Author: CNN Newsource

By Felix Cortez

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    SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Calif. (KSBW) — The annual crop report for Santa Cruz County shows strawberries as the top crop and highlights the agricultural industry’s recovery from the 2023 floods, with organic farming playing a key role.

Larry Jacobs, named Santa Cruz County Farmer of the Year in 2025, is part of the growing organic agriculture industry in the county.

“Business has been good. We see the demand for what we’ve been growing has been growing,” Jacobs said. He noted that while demand hasn’t grown as rapidly as in the initial years, there is still an increase as the public becomes more aware of the benefits of crops grown without pesticides.

Organic production in Santa Cruz County has seen significant growth over the past several years. According to the latest 2024 crop report, organic production was valued at more than $142 million, accounting for roughly one-fifth of all crop production in the county.

The 2024 crop report also indicates a strong production year overall.

“2024 was a really solid production year,” the Dave Sanford, Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner, said. “We saw upticks kind of across the board on most of our major commodities. Berries particularly had a very strong year.”

Strawberries continue to be the number one crop, with production in 2024 valued at more than $741 million, marking a more than 13% increase from the previous year.

The report also shows how the industry is rebounding from the devastating 2023 floods.

“Those storms really impacted the length of the growing season and even just direct physical impacts on some of the production fields. So we did see some loss in ’23 for sure,” Sanford said. “And in ’24 we’re really seeing a bounce back to, you know, the solid values that we were sort of expecting.”

Organic farmers also faced challenges due to the flooding but are recovering, with growers increasing the acreage dedicated to organics. Jacobs Farms, for example, doubled the acreage dedicated to tomatoes.

“The wetter year cut things short a little bit,” Jacobs said. “This year’s going better and we planted more tomatoes this year, so we’re having a good year with our tomatoes.”

This year’s agricultural report was dedicated to Steve Driscoll, who passed away this year after dedicating 17 years to the Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office.

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By Eric Graves

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    LIBERTY, Mo. (KMBC) — The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is trying to track down a scammer that tricked a local man out of $120,000 over the course of several months.

Sarah Boyd, public relations manager for the sheriff’s office, said the 61-year-old victim met the person on TikTok.

The suspect claimed they were a 34-year-old woman named Lisa.

Boyd said “Lisa” first reached out to the victim last year but got no response. In March, “Lisa” reached back, and this time the victim responded.

Over multiple months, Boyd said the victim thought he was building a relationship with this online profile posing as the 34-year-old house keeper named Lisa.

A big red flag came when the scammer asked the victim to start messaging on a different app.

“She asked him to move that conversation over to telegram, which is an encrypted messaging app,” Boyd said. “And that’s a very common practice that scammers use is to move conversations to an encrypted app, because they’re very hard for anyone to track.”

From there, Lisa started to have a series of emergencies and ask for help.

“It starts out small,” Boyd said. “Like in this case, they start asking for gas money, then for some pricier car repairs.”

Boyd said the victim was originally sending money through CashApp, but she said his account shutdown.

That was when another major red flag came up, the scammer asked the victim to send them money through cryptocurrency.

“That cryptocurrency is almost impossible to get back,” Boyd said.

Boyd said the victim sent BitCoin to the scammer from two different BitCoin ATMs, one in Excelsior Springs and another in Kearney.

“Scammers ask folks to withdraw cash from their bank, they put it in the cryptocurrency machine, the Bitcoin ATM, and then that gets transferred,” Boyd said. “The cash gets transferred to an account somewhere in the world.”

Over time, Boyd said the scammer built up trust with the victim, eventually asking for a huge sum of money.

“Finally, she said that she needed to sell her mother’s house,” Boyd said. “But she had to pay these back taxes on it and needed his help, paying those taxes, and said she would pay him back when the house sold.”

Boyd said this is where the victim lost the majority of the $120,000.

After this, the victim told his adult daughter what was happening. His daughter recognized the scam and came to the sheriff’s office.

The victim is now short $120,000 with few avenues for law enforcement to recover this swindled money.

“A lot of these folks are overseas,” Boyd said. “They can digitally cover their tracks, make it look like they’re at one IP address when they’re really at another. It is unfortunately very unlikely we’ll be able to identify a suspect in this case. We’re going to give it our best shot.”

Boyd said this is a textbook romance scam.

“They build up a relationship with these folks and it becomes an emotional relationship,” Boyd said. “It’s not transactional to the victim. It’s somebody they care about. Even though they may have never met them, they feel that they care about them. So it’s really hard for them to see what’s happening as a scam, because if that’s true, their heart gets broken, too.”

Boyd said it’s such a common scam there are likely more happening across the metro right now.

She wants potential victims to know what to look for.

“Somebody you’ve never met who you’ve only had contact with online asking for money,” Boyd said. “Anyone asking you to send money via cryptocurrency is big red flag and a lot of times the victims of this are very secretive because they think their loved ones will try to break the relationship up.”

Boyd said loved ones of possible victims need to keep an eye out, too.

“We want loved ones to look for, like, strange and excessive expenditures,” Boyd said. “Like, where is their money going? You know, that kind of thing. Show them examples of what has happened because they don’t want to believe that it’s a scam.”

The Clay County Sheriff’s Office is working to add warning labels and scam alert stickers to every cryptocurrency ATM in the county.

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By Lindsay Stone

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    CINCINNATI (WLWT) — A boy in Monroe faced heartbreak when his favorite toy tractor was stolen, but what happened next turned that sadness into joy and showed how powerful a community’s heart can be.

If there’s one thing 6-year-old Colton Majors loves to do, it’s farm. Every day, he hops on his play tractor, ready to wrangle the weeds and rule the front lawn.

“When its fall, I can pick up the leaves with it and throw it in the back,” Colton said.

When his dad put up a sign in the front yard announcing his campaign for Lemon Township trustee, Colton had an idea to add his tractor as decoration.

“I was trying to put it there to help my dad get his sign better so everybody can vote for him,” Colton said.

But days later, when Colton went to football practice, his tractor and gator were stolen.

“Anyone who knows him knows how much he loves those,” his mom Brittany said. “He’s on them every day, 24/7. That’s his farm equipment, just like his dad. It was very sad, especially for him.”

His mom posted on Facebook asking if anyone had seen Colton’s missing tractor and gator. Instead, the Monroe community took action, raising over $1,000 to get Colton new ones.

“We were able to replace both and the remainder we were able to donate to the Monroe PTO so they could get toys for outside,” Brittany said.

Colton was overjoyed to see his new tractor. To watch the moment he got the surprise, watch the video above.

“They took something that was heartbreaking for my son and turned it into something beautiful and better for the community,” Brittany said.

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By Todd Magel

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    BOUTON, Iowa (KCCI) — A construction crew is busy building two new, giant grain bins for farmer Mike Brelsford. It’s a $1.2 million project he’s constructing due to the soybean trade problem.

“Most years we go and, we will sell some at harvest, but you can’t do it this year. You’re going to lose money,” said Brelsford, who farms 6,000 acres around Dallas and Boone Counties. After 50 years in the fields, he says this is the worst trouble for farmers since the farm crisis of the 1980s. He, other farmers, and co-ops are busy building additional storage so they don’t have to sell soybeans at a loss this fall.

“Once again a supply and demand. And if China doesn’t buy our beans, then we have no place to go with them. And the elevators can only hold so much to they run out of room,” Brelsford said.

Brelsford saw the soybean crisis coming, so he ordered the new grain bins last summer. It’s a gamble he hopes will pay off once crop prices rebound, allowing him to sell soybeans without taking a federal handout.

“No farmer wants taxpayer money. We want to be a business like John Deere and Pioneer. We want to set our prices and make, be able to pay our bills,” Brelsford said.

A possible federal government bailout for farmers could be announced anytime.

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By Russ Reed

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    NEWBURGH, Maine (WMTW) — Amazon says the hundreds of Maine ballots found in a Newburgh woman’s package were not put in the box by anyone who works for the company.

The Newburgh resident said she found five bundles of 50 blank ballots in an Amazon delivery she received Sept. 30. The woman told Maine’s Total Coverage reporter Jackie Mundry the package appeared to have already been opened and retaped.

According to the woman, she found all the items she had ordered in addition to the 250 ballots for the Nov. 4 general election. She said she immediately called the Newburgh Town Office and handed the ballots over.

In a statement shared with Maine’s Total Coverage, Amazon said it is cooperating with the law enforcement agencies investigating the incident and it seems someone outside the company is responsible.

The company said that based on initial findings, it appears the package was tampered with outside of Amazon’s fulfillment and delivery network, and not by an Amazon employee or partner.

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the city of Ellsworth received two boxes of absentee ballots as planned on Sept. 30, but one of those boxes was missing five packets of ballots totaling 250 ballots. Bellows said Ellsworth officials notified state election officials, who then contacted the printer and authorized carrier of the ballots to investigate what happened.

In addition, Bellows said a conservative blogger emailed a staff member at the Secretary of State’s Office at about 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 1 to notify them that they would be posting an article about the Newburgh woman’s claims. Bellows said state election officials did not receive word from Newburgh town officials until 8 a.m. on Oct. 1, who reported that they received the blank ballots from the resident. According to Bellows, detectives with her office immediately went to Newburgh and secured the blank ballots.

Bellows said as soon as her office became aware of the Newburgh incident, she directed the Secretary of State’s Office law enforcement division to investigate. According to Bellows, those investigators are working closely with the Maine Attorney General’s Office and Maine State Police, as well as federal law enforcement partners, including the FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

“I have full confidence that law enforcement will determine who is responsible, and any bad actor will be held accountable,” Bellows said Monday. “We will not stop until we have answers.”

Bellows said the number of ballots reported missing in Ellsworth corresponds to the number of ballots received by the Newburgh resident, but she would not confirm if the ballots found in Newburgh were the ones missing from Ellsworth. The two communities are approximately 40 miles apart.

According to Bellows, the ballots that were found in Newburgh cannot be used to cast a vote, and that Ellsworth has received 250 new ballots and now has its full allocation.

Bellows also said an out-of-state private organization contacted Maine election officials because they believed they were in possession of return envelopes for Maine absentee ballots, but she said her office was able to confirm that all communities have received their appropriate shipments of return envelopes.

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By Elena LaQuatra, Kalea Gunderson

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    CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pennsylvania (WTAE) — A cow was rescued from the median of I-79 near Cranberry Township in Butler County Wednesday morning.

Sky 4 was over the scene where the cow somehow got into the median on the interstate near mile marker 81. State Police said several people reported seeing the cow around 7 a.m.

Traffic was backed up for about two miles approaching the area while police remained at the scene.

The news alert reached the right person, local farrier Kyle Carson.

“I decided this morning before I was going to go to work … I was like, well, I might call and just see if they need a hand,” Carson said. “The crews there had traffic stopped, and we sat there for a little bit and just kind of assessed the situation and let the cow relax a little more and just hang out. And then I just rode right up here and roped her and then took her over to the trailer.”

Carson said shortly after 10 a.m. he was able to rope the cow and get her loaded safely onto a trailer. He was relieved, noting this could have ended much differently.

“My cattle and livestock have just always been a part of my life, and that’s why it’s important to take care of them when they need taken care of and that was a situation that she was put, not just in danger herself, but mainly putting people in danger and a lot of them. So it was important to go get her caught.”

While this wasn’t his first rodeo, the irony of the highway rescue was not lost on him.

“The funny part about this whole thing is that my horse, his name is Highway,” Carson said.

State Police were able to confirm with local farmers that she doesn’t belong to them, but she was taken to a local farm and is receiving veterinary care.

How the cow got loose on the highway is still unknown.

“We do not have owner information or know where the cow came from. Local farmers confirmed it does not belong to them,” state police told Pittsburgh’s Action News 4.

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