We were having a legal battle with a conservation group over a small piece of land up north. They were trying to take half of our land. It was intimidating going up against a large do-gooder organization. Their specialty was land acquisition. They also "partner" with private landowners who voluntarily put restrictions on their own rights of use, e.g., herbicides, logging, subdivision development, water and mineral rights. Basically, they offer the poor landowners free water storage tanks to sign over all their rights to them. Without the water rights, your property value drops drastically. Fortunately, we won the legal battle but they were so aggressive that it made me suspicious. They had bought a piece of property next to us. They thought they owned our piece, as well. When we confronted them, they said that they had it surveyed. We had game cams and we caught them moving the survey markers. One guy seemed like a little sociopath. He approached me with a picture of a trailer on what he thought was their property. He said that someone has stolen some grow containers. It was my property. I didn’t care because I wasn’t planning on growing marijuana but I knew that he was putting in a big commercial grow. I noticed a white marker number on the trailer indicating that it was a rental. You should have seen his face when I pointed that out and told him that I’d look into it and find out who rented it.  A short while later the president contacted me and said that one of their members said that they had taken them and that he was sorry for accusing us. Come to find out, they put in for a sixty-five-thousand-dollar grant for cleanup and planting trees on our property. We didn't allow them access to our piece and theirs turned out to be only 1 1/2 acres. I looked through the grant and it was blown way out of proportion. They were supposed to use some expensive land restoration company to clean the soil and plant thousands of trees. I didn’t want any sneakier shenanigans and so I video taped their cleanup. Two guys on the board showed up with their personal backhoe, rented a dumpster, scooped up garbage, and then stuck about twenty pine starts in the ground. They worked about two-three days. They were taking photos of our property to make it look as if they were cleaning it, too, but they didn't.

One of the staff members has a PhD. in Sociology from Rutgers University. She mediates land conflicts, timber harvest plans and water disputes. I called her and told her that I knew how much the grant was and that there was no way in hell that they did $65,000 worth of work. I told her that it was none of my business, but that if I had anymore problems with them, that I’d turn them in for grant fraud. These fucking grant whores are nothing but common thieves. This sort of thing probably happens a lot.