Just because something isn’t sitting in a store with a price tag on it doesn’t mean it’s free, people. Which is why it’s quite rude that big old meanies have been swiping corn at Connecticut corn farms, not because they’re hungry and in need of a snack, but to sell for 100% profit off the back of a truck.

Two recent thefts at farms about 25 miles apart in Connecticut are ticking off the farmers who raise that corn to sell at farm stands in the area for a living, reports the New York Times.

A father and son team have been charged in one of the thefts, after the farmer caught up with them when they fled with their allegedly ill-gotten gains. He says the twosome targeted 40 acres of his family farm that lies outside a locked gate, and worked their way through the rows before he confronted them.

“One was holding the bag, and the other was filling it up,” the fourth-generation farmer said.

They were easy to spot when he caught up with them just before police did.

“They had corn tassels in their hair,” he told the NYT, “A dead giveaway.”

While the two suspects are facing three months in prison and $500 in fines, other farmers in the area say that wouldn’t be the right punishment for the alleged crime.

“Heck, I don’t want these guys to go to jail,” said the sales manager at another farm with an unsolved theft of its own. “I want them to pick weeds on farms for two summers in a row. See how much of an appetite they have for stealing corn after that.”

Farmers suspect that the thieves are swiping the corn and selling it miles away, off the backs of trucks instead of at local markets where everyone knows each other.

It isn’t easy to keep an eye on all those fields, which makes finding the perpetrators tough. For now, some farms are installing surveillance cameras, and trying tricks like planting “cow corn” used to feed animals along the edges to dissuade thefts.

“Eat that and you will never steal corn from there again,” a farmer advised on one of the farms’ Facebook pages.

Crime Where Telltale Clue Is a Corn Tassel [New York Times]

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