23 Intriguing Farm & Farmer Facts Everyone Should Know

Belgian farmers are required by law to "care for the emotional well-being of their pigs" which often includes giving them toys to play with. 

Farmers differentiate watermelon by gender. "Boy" watermelons are longer and more watery, while "girl" watermelons are rounder and sweeter.

In 1978, the farmers in a small Chinese village called Xiaogang gathered in a mud hut to sign a secret contract, which split the village's collective farm into individual farms for each family. This gave them incentive to work harder as it was their personal property. They thought this decision might get them executed, but the plan was a massive success and became a future model for the rest of China.

A farmer named Fred Tuttle won the 1998 Republican primary for Vermont senator. He would ask his opponent, a millionaire "carpetbagger" from Massachusetts, questions at debates that only Vermonters would know. Tuttle would endorse his Democratic opponent of whom Tuttle said, "He knows how many tits on a cow."

A Portuguese farmer named Aníbal Milhais turned soldier, held off two attacking German divisions with a Lewis Machine Gun solo, forcing them to bypass and eventually surround him. After not eating or drinking for 3 days, he rescued a trapped Scottish major and returned to Entente lines.

In 1922, a German farmer found footprints leading from the woods to his farm, but no footprints going back. Days later he was murdered along with his whole family. The crime has never been solved.

In 1945, a farmer named Lloyd Olsen chopped off a chicken's head and missed the jugular vein. A clot formed and some of the brains stem survived, providing basic homeostasis functions. Mike the headless chicken toured in sideshows for 18 months and earned the farmer $4,500 per month at the peak of his popularity.

In 2006, a German rabbit farmer named Karl Szmolinsky sent 12 giant rabbits (the size of dogs) to North Korea for the purpose of a breeding program, but he refused to send more after realizing that officials might have eaten the rabbits instead of breeding them.

A British farmer named Robert Fidler in Surrey built a faux castle and hid it behind a towering wall of haystacks and tarps for 4 years trying to exploit a legal loophole that said a building was legal if no one complained about its presence for 4 years.

On August 25, 1970, a group of Icelandic farmers blew up a dam project on the Laxá River that would have swept away their farms. Around 100 farmers turned themselves in but no one would snitch on who lit the fuse. They all walked free.