Preview of coming attractions
The Farm Wars.
A few weeks ago, 42-year-old Jared Bossly ventured out into his farm to plant alfalfa.
Bossly’s farm in Brown County, South Dakota has been owned by his family for four generations. They grow corn, beans, and alfalfa in addition to raising cattle. They also plant trees all over the property as a windbreak to protect the herd.
Bossley has put his entire life into his work, and has passed those values along to his children. He and his 17-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son work on the farm daily to do the right things for the land.
Every spare penny the Bossly family has goes into their farm. Interviewing Bossly, I was struck by the level of care they put into their work.
On this particular day, he was nine miles away from his residence when he received a text from his wife, who works as a nurse but was home that day on leave from her job while recovering from gallbladder surgery.
She was in the shower when she heard their front door open and a voice yell “hello.” Mrs. Bossly asked her husband if he was expecting anybody, to which he said no. She then got dressed and went downstairs to see who it was.
Meanwhile, the two men who opened the front door of the house, then walked into Bossly’s shop adjacent to their home before heading back out onto their farmland.
Mrs. Bossly then called him to update him on the situation and he told her to go see who they were.
They identified themselves as surveyors from a company called Summit Carbon Solutions (SCS).
The Bossly family are just one of over 80 South Dakota landowners facing eminent domain lawsuits Summit filed in late April.
These 80+ properties fall in the path of a planned 2,000-mile carbon capture pipeline the company plans to build. The planned project traverses five states and aims to capture carbon dioxide from ethanol plants in Iowa and sequester it underground in North Dakota.
In South Dakota, there is no clear process laid out by which an entity is granted the power of eminent domain. Historically, once a project is approved or permitted by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), it assumes the power of eminent domain. But under the PUC’s Pipeline Sitting Guide, pipelines are designated as common carriers, which deflects the decisions to the circuit court system.
And despite the fact that the pipeline has not yet been permitted, SCS is taking advantage of South Dakota’s lack of private property protections and using it against landowners like Jared Bossly.
Read all of it—and prepare to get good and pissed off about this criminal outrage. And all in the name of “Green energy” and Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™, natch.
They’re “afraid of us?” Because “we have all the guns?” Oh, I think this incident ought to put paid to that comforting fairy tale handily enough. My God, these corporate shitweasels opened the front door of a private dwelling and came inside before proceeding to wander the property as if they owned the place, poking their noses into storage sheds and such at will, just as pretty as you please.
Sorry, but they aren’t ever going to be truly “afraid of us” until we get those guns out of the gun safe, load them, and start greeting agents of the State at the front door with them in hand, every time they dare to set foot on private property to harass us, intimidate us, and steal from us.
A nice, quiet evening at home spent having their significant other laboriously pick pellets from a properly-administered load of double-aught buckshot out of their baggy asses with a long set of surgical tweezers whilst they sweat, bleed, and groan with pain will make ‘em think long and hard about ever attempting such a foray again, I’d bet. Where I live, if I were to go waltzing around somebody else’s property without a specific invite like these shitwits did, I would expect no less.
Update! A minor thought: around these parts, we have a word for it: traipsin’, which was originally just Southern mumble-mouth shorthand for trespassing. I have “No trespassing” signs posted all over the property, and now that I’m permanently confined to a wheelchair and thus incapable of any brawling or rasslin’ around, it’s now shoot first and don’t ask any questions at all for me. Fuck around and find out, that’s the rule of the day around here.
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