Lighting money on fire is one way to go.

This is a story about one spiteful old farmer with nothing left to lose.

And if you’ve got your wits about you, there’s a lesson to be learned every single day.

Cancel a land lease and hope to make a windfall? Hope you like a lot of dirt.

Let me preface this by noting that this revenge was not my doing. At least… not exactly.

It happened back in the 90’s when I was in high school, and centered around the type of school I attended.

OP explains the agriculture & technology schools in America, an important backstory, as they were unwittingly part of the whole scheme.

So, in case you weren’t aware, it’s very common in agricultural communities to have what are known as ‘farmer’s schools’. That’s not a technical term, but more just something easy to define them.

The schools are generally organized by the local farmers, and while you still study the various courses needed to get into college, you also study farming technology courses, and get credit hours for work study (IE working on one or more farms).

The area I lived in was surrounded by a number of large farms which grew cotton primarily. So during the year, we’d spend time out in the field both tilling, planting, and harvesting.

Enter the narrator, who, in part of the school’s program, helps out farmers in the area.

One of the farms near the school, was this thousand acre spread that like the others grew mostly cotton, though sometimes they rotated to soybeans, or silage.

(Basically corn, but you don’t harvest it.)

This farm had a long partnership with the school, so the students provided near free labor for the farmer.

The farmer leased this property from some out of state owner, and paid them a portion of the revenue from the harvest.

They received a rather…strange day’s working orders.

Imagine my surprise then, when I and many of my classmates arrived at the farm to do our work study, and the farmer instructed some to crew the sprayers and start spraying herbicide on the fields, while others (myself included) were to take tractors and discs and plow everything under.

The farmer wanted every square inch of the fields returned to just dirt. We were shocked, to say the least, but after some discussion we set to work.

It took us the better part of a weekend to do so, and when we were done the field was in a beautiful, if barren, state.

The farmer thanked each of us personally, and paid us about 500 dollars each. (Quite the sum for a 90’s high school senior).

We returned to the school, told our headmaster that the ‘contract’ was completed, and he informed us that the farmer would no longer be working with the school, and we’d be sent to one of the other larger farms for the rest of the year and our work study.

It was probably two or three months later before word started going around about why we’d been instructed to destroy the crop.

Granted, these were just rumors, but based on how things turned out for the farmer, I suspect there’s some truth to it.

As far as he understood, it sounded like good old fashioned revenge.

So, apparently the landowner had decided that he was going to not renew the lease the farmer had on the land.

This lease renewal just so happened to fall a few weeks before harvest season would start.

Given that the average cotton farm earns about $1,500 per acre, a 1000 acre farm would easily net the owner $1.5 million dollars. About $500k of that being pure profit.

I don’t know what the farmer’s lease was, but it stands to reason that it wasn’t anywhere near that.

The owner’s plan was bad form, to say the least.

So this landowner had figured out a neat little ‘trick’.

Let the farmer get a good crop planted, and then refuse to renew the lease. The farmer would leave the plants in the field, and the landowner would just need to pay some contractors to come harvest it, and they’d earn a profit.

Since at the time, the farmer’s lease wasn’t yet up, he decided to prevent that from happening.

His act of revenge against the owner, was to prevent them from cashing in on their hard work.

Sure, it destroyed his farm, and he had to sell off most everything he owned to buy some property for himself, but he’d proved a point.

The farmer seems to have thought of every angle. And was impervious, it seemed, to any legal action.

The owner did try to sue the farmer, though he (the owner) really didn’t have a leg to stand on, or so I was told.

I think the court ruled that since the farmer was still under the lease when he had the land tilled under, then it was his property to do with as he wished, and thus the landowner couldn’t tell him what to do with his property.

I learned a rather valuable lesson from that man, beyond what I learned about farming. That lesson was, never…ever cross someone with nothing to lose.

There’s something to be said about that kind of rural cunning!

OP seems to have been keen to the blatant wrongdoing of greedy people.

And the comments section was all here for it.

This person just saw the whole thing wrapped up in a bow.

A farmer even chimed in on the matter!

One person harkened to a tale as old as time.

Another Redditor summed it up quite nicely.

OP had a first-row seat to a wild ride.

One thing we all learned: don’t mess with farmers!

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.