The OPP has launched an investigation into the incidents
By Diego Flammini
News Reporter
Farms.com
The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) have launched an investigation after farmers near Ottawa discovered rebar buried in their fields.
Thomas Wahler ran over a piece of rebar last week while harvesting a 125-acre corn field in Bourget, Ont. The rebar had been cut, sharpened and specifically placed to do maximum damage.
“Whoever did it knew where the combine was going,” Klaus Wahler, Thomas’ brother, told Farms.com today.
“My brother started combining at 8:00 a.m. (on Dec. 1) and he drove over the rebar with the inside dual wheel. The pipe was sharpened to go right through the tire and it did exactly that.”
“We basically lost the entire day and by the time we got the first load of corn to the elevator it was after 8:00 p.m.”
The piece of rebar that punctured the combine tire was only one of three pieces of metal debris the farmers discovered.
In addition to another piece of rebar found in the field, someone had attached metal to the corn crop itself, Wahler said.
“A steel post was duct-taped to the corn stalks and pieces of the post went into the corn head,” he said. “It caused big damage to the intake rolls but we don’t know how much for sure yet.”
The other remaining mystery is trying to find out why someone would do this, says Wahler.
“You can speculate but really we have no idea why,” he said.
The Wahlers aren’t the only farmers to find rebar buried amongst their crops.
Tracy Koch, who farms with her father about 20 minutes away from the Wahlers in Plantagenet, Ont. also recently found pieces of metal sticking up from the ground.
She walked the fields with a metal detector after her father struck a piece of metal in November.
And like the Wahlers, the question she wants answered is “why?”
“I don’t know if there’s a reason, if we’re on the road and bothering people,” she told CTV News. “But this is our job, farmers feed cities.”