Need something really stinky

Really? Over firewood? Yes, clarification is needed, Plowpoint.

The situation is this, I own 5 acres that was split off a 40 a long time ago for a relative of the person who owned the other 35. I have a cabin and a garage and a chicken coop on my land. They have a house, a barn, and two garages on their 35. Both are located by the road and have a sort of lawn between them. I could almost hit their house if I threw a tennis ball with the ball flinger thing I use when playing fetch with the dog. I put a wood pile alongside one of the gardens. It is near the border between us. There is no question in the neighbor's mind where the border is.

The 35 is owned by an absentee landlord. He only comes up to hunt deer. The property is rented to a guy that is on disability and gets food stamps, heat assistance, and free medical care. His slow son lives with him. They have been there for about 2 years without any problems. This spring a neighbor friend of his moved in because of problems with his own house. This summer the tenant's daughter, her boy friend, their kid, the exwife, and several dogs moved in. He worked for a neighboring farmer during the summers. The others don't work.

They had about a cord of wood put away this summer but have burned it. He claims the propane tank is full so maybe they are heating with propane. The owner was here for deer season. He has converted one of the garages to a hunting shack. When he came up for the second weekend the chairs were missing from the shack. The tenants had them in the house. They claimed that there were no chairs in the house so they had to take them. The chairs that were in the house (I saw them) were wood so my best guess is they went into the wood stove. Last night I took the dog out after dark and the son was close to the border between the properties near the woodpile. When I came out he tried to hide behind a tree. I asked if he was taking a walk and he said he was thinking. He was out again, in the rain, when I walked the dog just before bed. When I was on the deer stand on wednessday I could hear them cutting down trees on the 35 with a chain saw. I think they are desperate for wood so why don't they put some up? The daughter's boyfriend does have a sense of entitelment. He asked the owner to leave his ATV up here last week so they could ride it.

There is snow on the ground now so I can see if anyone messes with my wood. Maybe this will be enough deterrent so more won't dissappear. I have secured my other stuff so it doesn't grow legs. Maybe this was a good warning before something really expensive goes missing.

This poster loves to post things like this and then when people get worked up about it and really have a head of steam going, he'll come back and accuse everyone of jumping to conclusions and give all kinds of extra information that makes him sound justified.
Major troll.

I don't know? Do they? Maybe you've got a degree in pschology so you can enlighten me?
What I meant to say is what are these neighbours like....do they keep the place clean and tidy and are they hard workers. You can generally tell the persons status quo by how they look after their posessions.

So you don't think a good honest person could resort to stealing some wood if they were down on their luck? They might have too much pride to get welfare. Who knows

Adding......I just read nimrods description of his neighbours so now I have an idea of what they're like.

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A wise person speaks when they have something to say but a fool speaks just to say something

I disagree and I think a lot of it is misunderstanding in scope.

We have a lot of problems because we have a lot more to watch out for. In this case the original poster is talking about 35 acres, we have 3200 acres, and while that is a tiny amount for a Texas Ranch, here in Maine it is considered a sizable farm. Even then we lease tillable land from 46 other farms in order to provide feed for our 1200 cow dairy farm, not to mention my own sheep farm enterprise.

Do you know how hard it is to try to keep marijuana growers from putting plants on that much land, or the number of times we have had fences busted by deer hunters, or how many times ruts caused by ATV's have busted our farming equipment? As I type this we are still actively bringing in our corn harvest and have three tractors, valued at about a million dollars collectively, sitting in a field that is about 2 miles from any house, in the middle of deer hunting season. Those are pretty easy targets to have windows busted out, sugar put in the hydraulics and tires slashed.

People do that because they have been denied hunting rights, or you tracked mud from the fields onto roads, or our cows smell too much for them...

The point is, when you have a big footprint in the county, you have a big impact that affects a lot of people in what they want to do. Sometimes that get bitter about what it takes to farm on this scale.

I do not blame anyone on here for not really relating to what I post because you cannot possibly understand how much we have to look out for. The police here do know that and let us take care of things. The State Police Detective told us straight up one time when we had problems with hunters, "You guys better take care of this because we won't." We are pretty reserved in how we act, but here reputation goes a long ways.

Last year a guy was talking about our farm and did not know who I was, he said, "Oh you never mess with that farm, they will come after you." It is that reputation that keeps a lot of problems from occurring in the first place. I think President Regan said it best, "The Best Defense is a Strong Offense."

Is this sort of thing required on a 10 acre farm? Hardly, call the police and have them deal with it. But on a 3200 acre farm with even more under lease with millions of dollars in crops, equipment and livestock...

I do not expect the small scale homesteader to understand all this, but at least I have tried to explain it. We really all just want the same thing; to be left alone.

Did you keep the beer can? Fingerprints will be on it.

cameras are really the best thing , you never know what problems traps or such will cause . don't put yourself in hot water over a prank to stop wood stealing.


and i can tell you that in my air tight stove i could burn a log with a urin vial in it and never know , it is over 1000 degrees in there and every thing burns , even rubber in small quantity would probably go unnoticed because the stove burns so completely

there are lots of reasonably priced cameras these days , video or still pictures work when you go to law enforcement time stamps are ideal

if you want to be nice , mail them a printed off still of them taking would tell them it stops or the next copy goes to the sheriff

Add and motion sensor switch to the recording of a pump 12guage. A familiar sound like that is a good deterrent.

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If they are stealing the landlords furniture to burn they may just end up poisoning themselves from the finish on it.

Get buck goat smell all over the tarp and the firewood. It is really, really difficult to get that stench off of one's hands and clothing and people who don't raise goats find it particularly obnoxious. By the time it is ready for you to burn, the smell should have weathered off.

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People like you are why people hate corporations. This is just unbelievable.

Well my goodness. Now that you've explained why you committed arson over a load of firewood, I can certainly understand why you would have to do it. As a large landholder and all.
I'm just bowled over that you didn't exercise your right to kill them or chop off a limb or two over it. Good on you for being so measured in your sense of justice.

wow, talk about a major thread drift. I think I'm in New Jersey now.

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misera est servitus ubi jus est aut incognitum aut vagum
(miserable is that state of slavery in which the law is unknown or uncertain)

I dont really have a solution for you but I was talking to a friend last night who had a similar thing happen. He is 72 and has a couple hundred acre farm and felt sorry for a neighbor who was lamenting that its getting cold and they have no heat. He found out they had a wood stove and he told him he had cleared some oaks out of a wood lot and told the neighbor there was some down trees he could take for fire wood but that he had some of them bucked up for himself and not to take those. Guess which ones the 32 year old neighbor went and took?

My friend is a nice guy but he was so ticked off he was beside himself and actually cursed which is unusual. He said he confronted the guy and he denied it even though the rounds were right on the ground in front of this guys trailer waiting to be split. He said the guy claimed he is the one who cut them from the downed trees and never saw any bucked pieces. It was a funny story the way he told it but the poor guy was really in a lather.

I think part of the problem is that some folks look to those who are industrious and have things and think they have so much they can just take what they want and it wont be missed. I would talk to them and pointedly ask them if they took it; they will get the message. And for those who think the Sheriff will dust for fingerprints or take DNA samples....way too many people watching CSI now days. Not only will the Sheriffs Office probably not even respond to a call about the theft of a small amount of fire wood, identifying fingerprints or DNA proves nothing related to the theft.

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I guess I don't understand why my post was deleted and told to "be nice" when all I did was say that I thought that bringing up politics in this thread was inappropriate. I see a bunch of others who are saying to do things like put stuff in the logs that will create a stink or worse and they go on with their discussion. I guess I just don't get it.

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"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow the fields of those who don't."-Thomas Jefferson

I wouldn't stack firewood, in plain view of the neighbor. Of course, I wouldn't live anywhere where there's a neighbor close enough to filch firewood....

If I did know someone that needed firewood, esp. a thievin neighbor, I'd tell em to put on their big boy boots and come with me... I'd saw em a cord or two and tell em to get after it... they could load on my trailer and unload it at their house. But I'd be damaged if I'd cut and split and haul it to em... with my calories.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

Once again, Texican has it right. A farmer who has a whole township as a footprint probably ought to have enough of a handle on all the folks who live on "his" land that he would know who is going hungry and cold and jobless...... and maybe he has a bit of an obligation to share in the way Texican mentions.....makes a much better community that way.

As for all us "small" ten acre peons, maybe just using a spray can of stoplight orange on the log ends would be enough to let the cops follow the evidence trail, or deter any further theft.
My own opinion...

geo

Your post was deleted because it quoted another "offending" post. You personally wrote nothing wrong or offensive.

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This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.....

You might get a cheapy driveway alarm, and set it up so that when someone crosses the beam it makes a loud dinging sound. If you could leave the receiver inside, where you will hear it, or outside your house, you should be able to hear it from inside, and the thief would hear it too. You could look out in time to see him scurry away.

I would remove the alarm after the first time you see him, or the alarm will be stolen.

But put it back up from time to time, in different areas, where you might have concern about something else being stolen.

And of course, the game cam is a great idea.

Is your place fenced? Even running a few strands of barbed wire between the properties wouldn't cost too much, but at least it would make it hard and time consuming to get through with an arm load of firewood.

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I yam what I yam and that's all what I yam.

Popeye

Last year we moved our wood pile next to our house inside the pasture fence. Our dog can hear if anyone or anything approaches our house and alert us. Stealing wood and selling it for drug money was big business last year until the four guys got caught. It's been quiet since.