When rainfall gauges were vandalized in Colorado and Kansas, a gang of farmers collected millions, and got caught

Artem Beliaikin via Sunsplash

Raindrops kept falling on the land, but just like the guy whose feet were too big for his bed, nothing seemed to fit …

Some version of the line from that 1969 B.J. Thomas tune — “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” — may have been going through the minds of the National Weather Service staff in Pueblo, Colorado, 10 years ago. In a June report by Chris Bennett in Farm Journal’s AgWeb Magazine, Meteorologist in Charge Jennifer Stark described it like this: “The precipitation data we were seeing made no sense to us. We’d watch radar with storms moving over southeast Colorado, and we had weather stations tabulating data hourly, but they’d often report no precipitation.”

Ahh, but there was someone else singing a stanza of that tune. In fact, a gang of someones. A group of fearless farmers did them some talking with the sun, and said they didn’t like the way he got things done, so they faked the burn.

To the NWS staff, Bennett explained, “rain appeared to fall everywhere” except into their rain gauges. “We started having weather observers calling and saying they were having trouble with their gauges,” Stark said. “Our technicians would go take a look and find unbelievably odd things.” Things like funnels siliconed, bowls tipped, wires cut, parts shotgunned, bolts loosened.

It was all part of a scheme to collect millions of dollars worth of federal crop insurance benefits. After doing about $11,000 in damage to these gauges, across portions to two states, Kansas and Colorado, Patrick Esch and Ed Dean Jagers managed to prove that their properties were suffering from extreme drought and collect $6.5 million. 

Like in all good true crime stories, in the end the duo and their cohorts were caught. They turned on each other. There were bribes and threats in emails and notes from girlfriends. One was wired up. One was imprisoned and then escaped, eventually found dead and rotting under mysterious circumstances. But crime paid for him, or at least for his estate, which got $500,000 in payment for his cooperation.

This was a particularly unusual agricultural fraud scheme but it was not singular. According to Bennett’s report, “crop insurance fraud echoes over certain counties and regions around the nation. Tobacco deception in east Kentucky and North Carolina; prevent plant in the Mississippi Delta; citrus schemes in Florida; and other crops according to locale.”