The bizarre case of the 85-year-old doctor who tangled with feds over planting asparagus

[Omaha Steve]

A warning sign posted in the ditch area where Dr. Robert Stratbucker planted asparagus in 2009 and again in 2014. Similar warning signs are posted roughly every 100 yards in the ditch.


http://www.omaha.com/columnists/hansen/hansen-the-bizarre-case-of-the--year-old-doctor/article_38e4a649-cfa7-5ae4-b7c2-599ca630a369.html

By Matthew Hansen

POSTED: THURSDAY, MAY 19, 2016 12:00 AM | UPDATED: 5:36 PM, THU MAY 19, 2016.
By Matthew Hansen / World-Herald columnists

In the beginning, before the warnings, the tickets, the surveillance cameras, the arrest and the federal trial — before he fought the law and lost — Ol’ Doc Stratbucker just wanted to grow vegetables.

He wanted to grow one vegetable, specifically, a spring veggie that he thinks is often raised badly in Nebraska. Doc Stratbucker had some ideas about how to raise it better, using roots from Wisconsin and the right amount of nitrogen and drip irrigation. And he wanted to do it on particular plot of ground, a thin piece of land that runs along a dead-end minimum maintenance road a couple miles outside Fort Calhoun.

“Everything about that ground made it particularly advantageous to grow asparagus,” Stratbucker says. “And that’s what I wanted to do.”

Everything made it advantageous, except one thing: This piece of land is owned by the federal government, the courts say.

FULL story at link.