Walking Minefields Is My Ministry — Removing Landmines from Farmers’ Fields

I think we need to be careful how much we run our lives based off of risk. And we need to be faithful to what God is calling us to, and recognize that sometimes God calls us to things that in man's eyes are considered risky. But we can rest in the protection that God offers.

So, Jared, tell me where we're sitting right now. So, right here, we're on the edge of a farmer's fields. And this here where the grass is, is a potential minefield. And as you can see here on the other side, we have dirt that's been worked up. But yeah, it's farmer's fields that now are classified as minefields. Hmm. And what is a minefield? Like unexploded munitions, things like that. Like, what are we looking at here? And yeah, tell me what that means. Yeah. So you have a minefield from recent conflict, or it doesn't necessarily have to be recent, but from conflict that then explosive ordinances are left behind, whether it's planted there intentionally by means of landmines, or it could even be explosives that did not explode as intended, whether it be rockets, mortars, bombs, any of that stuff is left after a conflict, and then that creates a potential minefield.

And we're trying to be safe and stuff, so we're obviously on this side of the sign. But like, if I were to go walking in that field, no guarantee I'm coming back. That's correct. That's the unknown with this field, is we don't know what's in there. Yeah.

But here's what I don't understand. So the conflict is over, there's no war here, you know, et cetera, where we're obviously where we're at. Then why is this still risky? Like, I always had this impression that government or military, somebody, after the war is over, you know, they'll come and clean all this up, and the farmers can have their field back, but clearly it's just grass now. I mean, they're not working this, obviously. But I heard that's not the case. Like, tell me more about that. So the best that I understand is the military often, they will clear in order so that their troops can safely travel through. And so that there could be an element of clearing done by the military.

But as the front line shifts, they clear, they find certain things to keep their troops safe. But then as they move on, this is what's left behind. And so then the locals, when they often will evacuate from areas of conflict, and when they come back to their homes after the conflict, then they come to places like this and their fields and go to work up. This is a big agriculture country here, and go to work up their fields, and this is what they're faced with. Anything that's been left behind that is now basically their responsibility. Oh, wow. So like the farmers are just left with this, essentially. Yeah. I mean, this is, in a sense, their responsibility.

It's not stated in that way. There are demining companies, there are people who do clear fields, but if a farmer is to come back in to restart his life again, and if his fields have mines in them or unexplored ordinances, it's up to him to get that taken care of in order to farm, unless somebody else steps in.

So you're describing what appears to be a pretty massive problem. I mean, this is one of just many, many fields. And if it's just left here for, say, the farmers or civilians trying to move back after a war is over, that seems like an issue. But how does that relate to the work that you're doing here? Yeah. So yeah, so we are working directly with the farmers. And so they show us the fields that they have that have not been cleared.

They are clearing many of the fields. I mean, they are coming out here day in and day out and disking fields. We have many, many stories of farmers getting hurt, blowing up their tractors. So we're here working directly with them. We have a tractor that runs with nobody in the cab, so we can run it remotely or completely autonomous. And we're offering to disk their fields so that they don't have to put one of their guys in the tractor. And this is something that, an idea we actually got from the farmers. There are farmers out here who are setting up their tractors to be run remotely or autonomously. And so that is something that we can offer to them, because these farmers, they've come back to their farms, their equipment's blown up, their houses are destroyed, their farms are destroyed, and this is just one piece in which we can help them get back on their feet.

So what you're describing sounds very almost like a friend-to-friend level or at a very organic community-based level. But I know one question people will have is, well, does that mean you're taking sides in a war? If you're coming in, say, to this field and you clear it to where it's safe and a farmer won't go out here and blow himself up, essentially, are you taking sides in a war? And tell us why that's not the case. Yeah. So absolutely not. This has nothing to do with taking any sides. We're working with the civilians who are dealing with the aftermath of war. And so it doesn't matter which country or which side we're working for. We're working directly with the civilians, the locals there.

And so we could work on either side of the conflict. If you're in an active war zone, you could be on either side. But it's about working directly with the locals and has nothing to do with picking a certain side. So it's not like you're collaborating with the military or. Absolutely not. No, we're working directly with the local people. Yeah. And I think that's really important because, so there's the acronym EOD, right? Which tells us what that means for starters. Explosive Ordinance Disposal. So an explosive ordinance, so like maybe a bomb that's dropped that didn't explode, but it is an explosive and it needs to be disposed of. That's correct. So that's what you're doing, essentially.

EOD work. Essentially. We don't technically get into disposal, that aspect of it. We are finding the explosives and then we report it to the authorities and they come out and dispose of it. Okay. Sure. So we're considered EOD, but we're not the disposal. We don't do the disposing ourselves. Sure, sure. But you're getting it out of the field so people can get on with their lives. But like when people hear EOD or they see it in the news or something, the connotation is always military. I mean, at least it was in my head, you know, until I found out about this and we started, you know, I started hearing about it and it's like, come over here and you show it, like yesterday, you showed me all this stuff, you know, around these fields and it's like, this has nothing to do with military.

This is just farmers out here trying to get landmines out of their fields, literally, you know, risking their lives. Yeah. Somewhere that connotation happens though with EOD, but again, just be really clear, like you're a non-resistant Mennonite, you know what I mean? Like this has nothing to do with that. But do you want to say more on that? Like I don't know where that connotation is happening, where people get confused on that. Yeah, it's probably just because it's not a common thing that's done among Anabaptists. As far as I am aware, there's not any other Anabaptists that have ventured into the minefields and trying to locate unexploded ordinance and remove them.

So I think it's just maybe a new concept, but the way we see it is, as Anabaptists, we have done a tremendous job at humanitarian aid when it comes to rebuild. So in this area, there's Anabaptist groups doing rebuild after the war, putting on roofs, doing house repair. There's food parcels, bringing food. There's different medical teams. All of these are being supplied in the area, which help people get back on their feet. But then what about the farmer who comes back? He's getting his house rebuilt. There's organizations helping with buying equipment. But then he comes to his field. Well, what does his new tractor do in this field? You know? And so it's just the way we see it is it's another step in helping them get back on their feet, helping them remove this from their field so they can get back to farming.

Because if their fields are essentially locked up as minefields, they don't really have options to make a livelihood, at least not in their former occupation. I mean, if you imagine you owned however many acres of farmland and it's useless now after war, that'd be kind of devastating, actually. Yeah, especially in this area here, which is largely agriculture, their source of income is farming. And so in order for them to move forward, they must get back to farming.

So what you're describing, I think it should be noted, is an issue in many places around the world. If I remember right, it's called ERW or something you were describing. Tell me what that acronym stands for. So Explosive Remnants from War. So yeah, and that's across the globe, basically. Anywhere there has been conflict, you have explosive remnants from war. And what's the big problem with that is they don't have expiration dates. So they can remain as long as they're there and they are not found. And so you can have a landmine that can last for decades and it can still be a threat. So that is a problem around the world. Anywhere in these countries that there has been war, which has been almost all of the countries since modern warfare, when we have explosives, that, yeah, they can be left behind and they can still cause damage years after the conflict.

And so, again, this field, it might be 50 years, 100 years, someone comes out here and steps on something and it might still explode. That's right. If no one ever comes in here and clears this, I mean, years down the road, there could be something in this field that could fatally hurt someone. This weekend, as you were showing me around, this was really clear suddenly. You were showing us, they're called like butterfly mines or something, right? They kind of fall out from aircraft and they're deployed and they kind of float down and lay on the surface. That's correct, yeah. And they're so hard to see. Like we were walking through this field and you're like, just be careful, you know, just I'll show you where to walk, you know, and so you take us up to the spot and we look and here's several that have been pulled out.

And they're designed to basically like maim you, you know, they're pretty small, like about as big as your hand. And it suddenly kind of went click for me because I had just interviewed Vince Lewis, who was a bomber pilot during the Vietnam War, and his episode's up, people can go watch that and how he left the Air Force and things. But he said the US actually dropped a lot of those, of these butterfly mines. And he had been back in Cambodia, where he had done very, you know, very country, he'd done bombing missions years, like decades. I mean, when was Vietnam War? You know, 50, 60 years ago. And done these drops. And there was someone in that village, yeah, that stepped on one of those mines and had blown his leg off, you know.

And this was, I mean, decades, you know, after the war. And I was like, wow. And so we were looking at these things. And I'm always going to be like, wow, if someone hadn't found that or hadn't pulled that thing out, 50 years later, a child could be running through a field, step on that, and it ruined their life forever. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it is a threat until it is removed. And that threat can continue on for years and years. Yeah. So maybe we should dive in a bit on the process, because people are probably looking at this being like, this is kind of out of the box, it's a little crazy. And we should probably start by clarifying, you have had a lot of training and things before you started doing this kind of work.

Do you want to tell me about the preparation process? Yeah. You say a lot of training, and there's definitely some training. But I would say the main thing of training that went into specifically our work with EOD or demining would be, we went to the country of Kosovo, and there was a humanitarian demining school there that offered training for this type of work. And so that was a program that was six weeks long. And that was very, very helpful. We also covered a lot of things that I would say are not helpful for what we're doing here. A lot of just some red tape stuff and a lot of procedures that are done across the board with larger demining companies.

But some of the main things that we would have focused on a lot was recognition of munitions. So that's really important. When you got into a field and you see something, you need to be able to recognize whether it's a munition or not. And so understanding the different categories of munitions, you know, rockets, mortars, landmines, submunitions, those are all different categories. So understanding recognition is very important. Another big thing is it safe to handle or not. Some things are actually safe to handle. Yeah, you showed me one of these yesterday, right? We were walking in a field and you're like, oh, this is scrap metal. Oh, this actually wasn't explosive, but I know it's totally safe.

Like this is completely safe. Oh, but that one definitely do not touch. Like I'm just following you, man. Like, you know, like, you know, I mean, how am I supposed to know, you know? Yeah. And so that was a big part. Like the take, I think the main takeaway we took away from that training was recognizing what is an explosive, what's an ordinance, and also then is it safe to handle or not. There's many things that we can look at on whether it's safe or not. Some of them, just because they have an explosive charge, they aren't going to blow up just because you pick them up, because of how they're fused and that sort of thing.

And if they're missing that aspect of it, because they're falling from the sky and they kind of fall apart, but they can also fall from the sky and be fully intact and with one nudge, or depending on whether it's a landmine, which is waiting for pressure. So if you provide that pressure, it will blow up. So understanding what is safe to handle, what is not safe to handle, that was a huge part of our training. But also then in preparing to come to work overseas, we did a lot of training within our organization, just general missions overseas training. And that was a big part too in helping us in doing what we're doing. But I would say as far as the actual EOD training, that was the six weeks that we spent in Kosovo, and that taught us a lot.

And yeah, it is something that we, day in and day out, we pray for wisdom as we're working, and we have learned a lot as we have been in the field. And experience is a great educator, but you also want to be careful with that because in a situation like this, that education, you don't want to learn the hard way in that sense. So. Wow, yeah, that carefulness. And I'm not sure I could do what you do. You know, really, like I'm just rolling with you guys, you know, and you and your team the last couple of days and just being like, wow, this, you know, this would take, you just had to be really steady and just pretty calm about it.

And very alert. The main thing is being alert with what you're doing, constantly alert because of the potential dangers that are there. But alertness is key. Yeah. And you've already talked about some of this, but isn't this dangerous? I'm sure people watching this will be like, what, that's crazy. That's way too risky. You know, why would you do that? So tell me about that. Is it dangerous? And then also, like, how did you assess that risk as you're thinking about moving your family over here to do this kind of work?

Talk to me about that. Yeah, yeah. So obviously there's an element of danger to it because we're dealing with explosives that if they go off, they can cause great harm. They can take life. They can maim. That's what they're designed to do. So we're obviously working with something that is dangerous. Now, we also are very calculated in what we do, and we have techniques in which we do things, and we don't plan on people getting hurt. Like we have ways in which we do it to try to avoid accidents happening and that sort of thing. But obviously there's a level of danger because of what we're working with. The question as far as the risk and evaluating that, so that's actually, I feel like that's a very good question and something to think about.

And that is something that my wife and I, we have processed through. And I don't know that we fully, we're still working through this, but this is some of what we've had to work through. So no matter what we do in life, we always are evaluating risk in anything that we do. Whether we actually truly think about it or not, but subconsciously, there's an element to where we consider risk. Because the prime example is if you need to go to the grocery store and buy groceries, you hop in your car and you go to the grocery store. There's a risk involved in that. You might have a car accident, which could take your life. There's a risk.

But we need food. We need to go to the grocery store. We weigh the risk and we go to the grocery store. And so that's, you know, we weigh that. And so the same for us, myself, my wife, and our family, we weigh the risk that's involved in this work. And I think a big piece that has really affected our lives is both of our dads have died. And my wife's dad was a farmer. My dad was a preacher.

We wouldn't view those as high-risk lifestyles. But my wife's father passed away from cancer. My dad passed away in a car accident. And so I think we need to be careful how much we run our lives based off of risk. And we need to be faithful to what God is calling us to. And recognize that sometimes God calls us to things that in man's eyes is considered risky. But we can rest in the protection that God offers. And if we're being faithful and following God, to me, that's the most important thing. I could be fearful of the risk that's here and say, I need to pack up my family. We need to go back to America.

And we need to live a risk-free life for my family. Well, my dad was killed in a car accident. My wife's father was killed by cancer. You know, and so to us, the most important thing is to follow God and trust Him for protection in what we do.

So the big question then, why are you doing this? Like at the core, yeah, okay, you've explained the risk. You've explained the danger and the training. But like, why do you care? You know, why would you go to the effort, the inconvenience, the cost, all of this? Why would I? Yeah, I think sometimes that's actually hard to connect with when you're not here on the ground seeing the need that's there. And I think when we connected with this the most was when we came and did an exploratory trip to this area. And we saw, we came for this reason to check this out. But we saw all of the aid that was pouring into the country and the rebuild that was happening.

And yet farmers are going out in the fields and risking their lives on a daily basis. And the burden that they're, you talk to them and the burden that they're carrying in having to clear their own fields. Now they can wait. There are demining companies here. They can wait in order for that to be cleared. But there's no end in sight on when that's going to be. Oh, it takes an incredible amount of time to do it. The demining companies, it takes them a long time. They have a very thorough process and it takes them a long time. And so farmers can't wait years and years and years and years for their fields to be cleared.

And so they're taking that burden on themselves and clearing their fields. And you come here and you meet with them and you talk with them. And we just, we got a real burden for the people that are facing this. And we want to share in that burden. And we have the resources. We have the opportunity to come and help in this way. And that's, it's sharing in that burden is why we're here.

So let's get into some details because I think people will find this really fascinating. I find this fascinating. The process of you show up to a field like this. How in the world do you get it cleared and safe and you know all of that? And I want to note too, okay, so here's a field that potentially could be full of mines. But there's a field right next to it that's all disked up and being used. Yeah. How come that field's being used and not this one? Yeah, so this here is a field that we would have disked with our tractor. And so when we came to this field, it would have looked just like this one.

What is nice about the time of year in which we're working right now is that they've been having some very dry summers, which is unfortunate for the farmers and they're growing their crops. But the grass during the summer dies off. And so you're left with a field like this that it's dry grass. And so one of the first things that we do is we'll burn off the field so we can have a visual of what we're working with. This is very difficult. You can't see anything in this grass. You don't have a clue what's in here.

So one of the first processes we'll do is burning off a field. And then a lot of it has to do with being familiar with the area and talking with the farmers. But we can identify problematic places where it's high potential for landmines. And landmines are some of the, it's kind of the main things we're really worried about because they are armed and they're ready. They're waiting for someone or something to come step on it, put pressure on it, and it blows up. And so that's what we're concerned about for our own safety. We're concerned about that for the tractor as well.

And so if there's an area that it's high probability of landmines, that is where we will take a metal detector and we'll use metal detectors to scan those areas to try to find anything that would, a landmine that would be buried under the surface. Can you show it? Yeah, like kind of gear and stuff you use for that. Yeah.

And so for people listening on, you know, on podcasts or whatever, I don't know, you can go to our YouTube or get the video somehow. But so this is a specialized metal detector of some kind, apparently, because I've never seen one quite like this before. So yeah, tell me about this. Yeah. So this is a metal detector. It's supposed to be a very good one. So we try to run good equipment when doing this. We want to find what is below the surface, if there's something below the surface. So we will just, we'll use this and do sweeps with the wand here. And obviously, if there's anything metal in the dirt, it beeps and lets us know.

That can actually be very problematic in some of these fields because we can have very, very, very high contamination of metal because you have multiple explosions happening in the field. I mean, you may have vehicles that have blown up. If it's along where there was a trench line, there can be shell casings just covering the ground. And so this does not always work. It will find metal, but the problem is there's more metal in a field than just landmines. And so we're limited with what we can do with this. But these have, these have worked for us in certain situations. And so yeah, if it's an area that we can use a metal detector, we will sweep the ground with it.

If we get a beep, then we can use our poking stick and we can come in and poke in the ground from the side. From the side so you don't trigger it. Yeah. So if you hit the mine, you're hitting the side body of the mine, which is fine. It's the top because it's pressure activated from the top. And so we can poke around. And if we don't feel anything, it can be a piece of shrapnel. It could be a shell casing, a bullet. It could be a bolt from a farmer from the past previous years of farming. It could be anything. And so we just use these prodding sticks to poke our way through as we find signals.

If we do, if we hit something, then I always carry a little dig knife in my pocket and I will scrape away at the dirt and expose what's there. So the goal would be, let's say it's a landmine. You expose it. So you're like, okay, here it is. Yeah. And then you're calling whoever the disposal authorities are. And they're either blowing it up right there, taking it somewhere to get disposed of. Exactly. That kind of thing. Yeah. Exactly. So we're locating them and then contacting the authorities and they come out and take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. But there's also a lot more than just landmines that you're finding out there.

And like when we were walking one of the fields that you guys had already walked it and stuff, but we're finding all kinds of just pieces of a rocket and this. And I mean, all kinds of I've never seen before. I've never thought about, oh yeah, this is going to be in someone's field. Yeah. And having someone like you that can say, oh yeah, this thing is safe. Like I know this is just a piece of scrap metal versus, hey, here's some things. Don't touch those. You know, those are really dangerous. And so again, I think that that is a key piece. You're not just walking into this randomly. Like you know what you're looking for.

Yeah. You know? Exactly. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, so we'll first use detectors to make sure that the mine threat, we feel like the mine threat is gone. But then we do, we walk fields in a very systematic way, doing visual sweeps and removing, yeah, whether it be scrap metal and scrap metal coming from blown-up rockets or vehicle pieces. And I have some of those I can show you as well. Yeah. So I think maybe some visuals to help us conceptualize, like we're not used to experiencing war, you know, in America and these kinds of things and the types of weapons that are used and just how evil, I guess you could say, or like how brutally evil these things can be to the people who are experiencing them, especially the farmers and so forth.

Show us some things that you pull out of these fields. And just to be fully clear, these are all obviously just safe scrap metal chunks. The real dangerous stuff is already disposed of and whatever. But yeah, show me some stuff here. Yeah. So a big part of what we do is clean up fields. And so we have pieces like this. Like this is just shrapnel from what would have been a rocket body. So you just, yeah.

Now this is, you know, I mean, obviously this piece is intact, but you could have just pieces of metal, just very, very sharp pieces that can be very, very fatal in hitting people. But yeah, a lot of the field was just full of metal like this. Like you literally just went over right over here and just walked right here. Yeah, I did. It was like just right there. You jumped out of the field. He was like, yeah, let's see if we can find a rocket piece for this. And it was like, boom, there it was. And it's like, I mean, like this, like what's this? I mean, it could be a piece out of a vehicle that got blown up or, and it's just, the fields can be just full of this, just complete trash.

Yeah. Just from the conflict. And so that's some of what we find. Obviously then we find a lot of remnants that would have been part of munitions. So this would be a rocket tail. The warhead would have been on this. So we find many, many, many of these where the warhead blew up, but the rocket tail is left. So we're constantly pulling stuff out of the field. You want to actually just leave it setting up so that people can, yeah.

Well, and with this, but then the other day when you were showing this, you showed me some of that were still intact that still had the explosive element on it. So it's like, oh, this is scrap metal. This is not. Exactly. You know, don't touch that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them for whatever reason do not go off. And they're still considered dangerous because they've been fired. They're armed. And it has to do with the fusing mechanisms. It's usually mechanical means in which the fuse works. And it has often shear pins. And it can be just on the verge of going off. And it takes one more nudge and boom. Wow. And so that's where we have to be very, very careful with something that is still fully intact and armed.

Even something like this. This is a canister that a landmine would have been inside. And this would have been completely buried in the ground. And this is what they consider a bounding mine. And this is kind of sobering to find this because this means this exploded.

This would have had a trip wire that someone would have tripped on the wire. And it would have detonated. The mine would have jumped out of this canister, hit the end of this cable, and would have blown and gone in 360 degrees in the air, you know, three foot in the air and blown. And so when we disked the field, we disked this up, which means there was a mine that had been detonated at some point. Wow. Who knows if lives were lost when that would have gone off.

Some of the fragments, well, yeah. Yeah, like this here, you know, we find pieces like this. I mean, just shards of metal from blown up pieces of rockets. And yeah, it's just, it's just the fields can be just littered with this kind of debris that we're bringing out and getting the fields cleaned up so we can disk. Yeah.

You want to show some of the pieces from the mine that you did hit? I think you were showing me that yesterday when you're driving your automated tractor through these fields, you know, you know, and you've made sure it's, you know, there's nothing exposed at least that's dangerous, but there's subsurface. Yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah. So this here is bits and pieces that would have been an anti-personnel mine. It's a plastic mine. It had been about that big around. And yeah, there again are the, our tractor, the front tire ran over it and thankfully it just blew up the front tire.

There were also three hand grenades in the hole with it. And I'm sure the idea behind it was that when the mine would have blown, that it would have also exploded the three hand grenades, which would have caused a much bigger explosion. Thankfully, they didn't go off. And so the damage to our tractor was very minimal. We just changed the tire and we were able to keep going. But yeah, that there, if someone would have stepped on it, that could have been a very much different story. Yeah. And that's the whole thought process behind using a piece of equipment with nobody in the driving it, you know, to say if there's something here, you want to find it.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that a right way of thinking? That's correct. Obviously, we do not want to blow up our equipment, but our goal is to have there be nothing explosive left in the fields when we're done. And so we do everything that we can to remove it from the field so that our tractor doesn't hit it, but our tractor is also run so with no one in the cab so that if there is something there, that the tractor finds it. And it's maybe at the expense of equipment, but not at the expense of someone's life. Yeah. And it's kind of crazy to think, you know, if, you know, if y'all hadn't done that, right? And 20 years from now, someone's walking through that field and steps on that thing, that could be the end of their life.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Technically, something of this size would, would, well, no, it could be the end of their life because they'd blow the leg off and they'd bleed out. Yeah. Yeah. Or at least radically alter their life. Yeah. I mean, you know, lose a limb or something. Yeah. I mean, that's, man. Yeah. Do you have a piece of those butterfly mines that you're showing us? So, yeah, so I have, I have the tails from them. So obviously, this is not the whole thing. You would have the explosive piece right here on the end, but it's plastic. It's just very small. The whole thing would lay right here in your hand. And, and it's, yeah, it's just about that big around.

And I believe these would have detonated from a fire when the field was burned off, possibly. Or, or, yeah, because I know the field was burned off from where we found these. But yeah, very, very small, but yet still packs enough of a punch to blow someone's foot off and really alter someone's life. Yeah.

Yeah, it's just, all of this just feels so wrong, you know, that these things exist in the world, that humans have turned their, humans have a great ability to build things and come up with ideas and be creative. And they've turned that, some people, towards building the most effective instruments to kill people that they can. Exactly. But I think the part that's even worse is once they're put in the ground, you know, or say a rocket is fired and it doesn't explode, it can sit there forever and still be a serious danger to people that have maybe a generation later have nothing to do with that conflict. They don't, there's no connection at all. There's just regular people going on with their lives and they're, and they're still paying the price for that war.

Exactly. You know, and war is awful and terrible, you know, like, yes, but that just feels like a whole nother level of awful. It is. It's like 20 years later and it's like, I had nothing to do with this and this mine comes blasting out of your field and kills you. Exactly. And that's what's so sad. And that, that in itself as well motivates us to be out here and helping the people with this because they're not going anywhere until someone comes out here and takes care of it. And if we can be a part of that, then that's what we want to do. I'm curious, you wouldn't, you don't have any actual landmines that have been, you know, the powder taken out or anything like that, right?

So do you have any of that? So I have one. This is a unique one here. So this one is considered, it's called a Palm 2. There's different ways in which these can be laid in a field. They come as a hand, a hand landmine. You can, they come in a case and they can throw them into the field.

And in this case, this one was attached actually to this rocket. And so the idea was that they would launch this rocket over a field. At some point, it would break apart. When we found it, it was still intact and laying on the ground. So it hadn't functioned as it was supposed to. But the rocket would fire it into the field and it would land and it would have a canister that would come off and these spring-loaded fins would make it stand up and stand in this way. And then it would, then a cap would come off the top and it would send out trip wires. And so this thing could be, that's sophisticated. Yes, this thing could be set in a field with, you could just lob this into a field and set landmines.

So you could have rockets just lobbing these into the middle of a field and setting these. And then it sits there and waits till someone comes by and hits the trip wire and then this would explode. Whoa. So how, how, how come this one doesn't have the explosives? Like how, how was this safe and all of that? Yeah. So this is where we work with the farmers and they are, they are very brave. It's, it's every day I'm amazed at their bravery. But so we found this one and it was still intact and it was attached to the rocket laying on the ground. And the farmer was with us that day. He was helping us walk the field.

And, and it was over the weekend. And so we, we, we saw it, we marked it. He said, he'll call the emergency services and they'll come out. Anyway, over the weekend, we, we come back the next Monday to keep working. And here we find this and it's all, it's, it's the explosives are now out of it and it was burnt. And here I come to find out he called the authorities and they said it would be, you know, a couple of weeks so they could come out. So he goes out there and just very gently lays a tire over it. Wow. And lights a tire, runs down over the canal embankment and sits down there waiting.

And he hears this, poof. No way. And it comes back and it just basically would have done what they call a low order. So it didn't explode. It didn't explode. Obviously, because it blew the top out. The explosives burned. And so here we have a perfectly safe casing of what would have been a landmine. That was a very brave farmer. Oh, wow. Okay. I certainly would not lay a tire around a landmine. Wow. That would be one line that we wouldn't cross. But I do, I get, I wouldn't want to do that, but I can understand him be like, hey, I got a field that I got to farm, you know, and this is like in the way.

Yeah. So to speak, obviously. And it just, it's another piece of showing like these people are trying to get back to their lives. Yeah. And how war is incredibly disruptive to life across the board. But even after the war is done, the war is still disruptive to life. Yeah. At least when it comes to these kinds of things. Exactly. It doesn't end when, oh, the peace treaty signed or the people leave or the whatever, you know, the war ends. There is still the remnants, you know, the remnants of war are very much still there. And I think that's the piece that's been hard for me to even, it's still hard for me to fully understand, even being here with you for a couple of days and we're seeing all this stuff.

It's just like, I can't imagine what life would be like if I had to live in that kind of situation. It's like, the war is done and yet it's not. Yeah. Yeah. And we're just, we're just seeing day in and day out the, how, how desperate these farmers are to get back to farming and the measures that they're taking in order to get back to farming. And they're, they're doing very risky things, but it just shows that they're, they're risking it. I mean, they're, they're going to get back to farming. They're going to get back to their livelihoods. And they're not waiting on the demining companies, the slow process in order, you know, waiting years and years.

They're, they're going out there and making it happen. And so that's, that's motivating us to, to try to provide a safe, a safe way for them to do this. And that's just offering our tractor saying, hey, we're willing to do this this field for you instead of you getting in your tractor and disking it. Yeah. Yeah. We, we met a farmer first day I was here that had luckily survived something like that. And then you showed me the blast crater and things. And you want to tell me a little bit about that story, like what happened? Yeah. So, um, yeah, he's become a good friend of ours, an incredible guy. And, and the stories he has is just will blow your mind, the many different stories he has of close calls.

But he, he is a man that has just taken on himself. He's going out and clearing his fields. He's getting back to farming. And yeah, one instance he was driving a telehandler through a field. He had walked both sides of it and he thought he was good to cross through on the one edge and ran across a tank mine, which was enough force to blow the telehandler on its side. And it messed him up pretty bad. He was in the hospital for a while. And he, I mean, he's got scars all down his back. Yeah. So he had like stitching and all that stuff that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was very lucky to be alive because a tank mine is a very, very large explosion.

Um, and yeah, that, that was one instance to where he himself actually was in a piece of equipment, ran over a tank mine. I mean, the crater was still there. I mean, what's left even after the field had been tilled. Yeah. They've been farming that field and you can still see. There's this big dip. Yeah. You know, actually I got some footage of it. Maybe we'll put that on the, on the video here. And there was like pieces of the glass and, you know, pieces of the broken equipment still laying off to the side. Yeah. And that was really sobering. Yeah. To see that as like, this is not just a theory. Yeah. You know, like this, this is a person we just met.

Yeah. You know, who the war came to him. I mean, he had, he had nothing to do with this. He was just trying to farm his field. He's just trying to get back to farming. Yeah. Yeah. And just, and just, you know, a little further down, um, he would have pulled a mine line out of 40 mines, just not, not far from that. Wow. And, um, wait, he, he found him and, yeah, and flagged him and everything himself. Yeah. That'd be so scary. He actually pulls them himself. Like he'll, he'll unscrew the fuses, pull them out of the field, and then he calls the, the authorities and they come out. And, uh, but no, I mean, he, he, he, he removes them from the field himself.

So he'd cleared all those, but missed one. Yeah. And that's what almost killed him. And then also another story in that mine line where he had removed 40, uh, he thought he was good to farm that field. He had, they had walked it, they moved out 40 mines. And, um, actually he has a picture, um, I, he sent it to me where they're farming the field directly next to it. They have like a combine in there and it's, and it's, it's working. And he's standing there right beside the field holding up a tank mine. And he found that 40, 40 mines right along, right next to where they were farming. So they started farming this one.