VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Join us as we share a heartwrenching yet inspiring journey of Chief, a family-owned Nebraska-based company, that recently experienced a devastating fire. This catastrophic event stemmed from a neighbor's equipment catching fire, leading to the destruction of their building and essential farming equipment. Despite the tragedy, the silver lining has been the overwhelming support from the online community, touching the hearts of everyone involved in this ordeal.
In this series of videos, we delve into the aftermath of the fire, highlighting the loss of our building, equipment, and even concrete structures. But with every cloud comes a silver lining - a GoFundMe campaign was initiated to help us recover financially, and the response has been nothing short of miraculous. We are eternally grateful for the incredible support we've received and extend our heartfelt thanks to the first responders, friends, neighbors, and especially our father, for their relentless assistance during the cleanup process.
We also take you on a tour of our property, showcasing the equipment and machinery that miraculously survived the fire. From our skid steer and excavator to tractor weights, wheel spacers, and a strip freshener, we are thankful that our house and barn were spared from the fire's wrath.
Despite the loss, we are determined to rise from the ashes. The insurance investigator has determined the cause of the fire to be a faulty battery cable, and we are already planning to rebuild. We have reached out to Farm Rescue for assistance and have also launched a line of shirts for sale, with all proceeds going towards supporting the affected family.
Join us on this journey of resilience and recovery, as we rebuild, restore, and rise stronger than ever. Subscribe to our channel to stay updated with our progress and to show your support. Thank you for being a part of our story.
Chief is a family owned, Nebraska based company comprised of 7 diverse brands. Chief, trusted, tested, true. Good morning everybody. It's been exactly one week since we covered the mass destruction that happened here. If you missed out on that video, a neighbor of Grant and mine, this is not ours, not on my property, this is not my equipment, not my building, was awoken in the middle of the night to his equipment tires exploding, his entire building and machine shed on fire with all of his equipment inside. All of his pickups, all of his tools, all of his spare parts, all of his tractors, his combine, his grain cart, his sprayer, literally everything burned to the ground.
He received overwhelming support from you guys after I posted his story online and I cannot thank you guys enough. I know that I have a lot of very loving, caring people who follow and support me, but to really see that in direct action, like right before my very eyes in real time, was a super emotional thing for me, but especially for Mike and his wife. You guys impacted them in a way that they were trying to explain to Grant and I, and just standing here and talking with them, you cannot explain how you guys made them feel. It's just really nice to know that it's not just all bad people out there.
You hear a lot of bad things happen on the news every day, and so it's just really nice and really refreshing after a wake of tragedy, something like this. to have the support that you guys gave them. So from the bottom of Grant and I's heart, thank you for helping out our neighbors. It really means a lot to us. But I kind of wanted to give you guys a little bit of a follow-up. I wanted to follow up with them. I just kind of wanted to show you what's happened in the week since Grant and I have been here.
So with the help of their neighbors, who actually just showed up to continue cleanup, all of the equipment has been hauled away on Lowboys, and not salvageable. I think it's all going to be ground up. And then all of the tin from the building got gathered up and put in a big kind of dump from the rear end type trailer. And that got hauled away to a scrap yard. And now we're just kind of continuing up the cleanup process. So we're getting all of the tools and just a sort of, I mean look at this. Like there's stuff like this, like just bolts. And that's an oil filter and there's tire shrapnel. And just like all of this.
the ramp is a huge wood nail there's still metal from the tires just stuff that you need to scrape up here's these are steps off of a tractor does that look familiar to anyone? Oh look at the steering wheel that is a genuine John Deere steering wheel junk Something that I didn't know is not only is obviously the building's no longer here, not only is that a complete loss, not only is the equipment a complete loss, but they can't even save the concrete that was poured under the building. I had no idea, but when a fire burns this hot, the concrete itself cracks and heaves and essentially like explodes itself. And so all of this is just gone to waste.
the moisture coming up from underneath gets superheated and tries to escape and it is enough force to bust up the concrete. They have to restart completely and he even said he was gonna be over $150,000 short from his insurance to replace the building. That's just the building. And you know building prices these days like everything all the supplies are through the roof and it's just It's just really a lot to take on for one family. Even if, so Mike did not start the GoFundMe, I didn't start the GoFundMe, somebody else did that for him and thank you to your generous donations.
I mean you guys have seriously helped him out but if that hadn't been started Mike would have gone into extreme debt that he would have been in his entire life, the rest of his life just. . . to continue farming. He wouldn't have stopped farming. And so, thankfully, thanks to your donations, he's getting so much closer to being out of a hole. But, yeah. Even if we reach the new GoFundMe goal, he will still be at least $200,000 in debt starting this next farming year, which is just crazy. It's just wild. Hi, I'm Amy. I'm Mike's wife.
And I think we all wanted to just say thank you to Laura Farms and for her to come and cover the story and just for everything that she's done. We appreciate her support and we appreciate you supporting her channel as well. We'd like to say thank you. to everybody around the world for supporting us. It's really enlightened us to and also been really kind to our heart to have people support us from all over the place. Thank you for your kind words and hope that you continue to pray for us and just be along with us on the journey of the cleanup. Yes, thank you.
For all the prayers, it is an awesome feeling knowing how many people are praying for you and also. . . Wanted to thank the first responders that were here. They were all volunteer fire department, get woke up in the middle of the night and come out and put out a big fire and danger associated with it. And thank you for our friends and the neighbors, all the help with the cleanup. And I also wanna say a special thanks to my dad for all of his love and awesome support. For sure. Thank you. So this is kind of interesting. From a distance, when we first pulled up, I thought it was a skid steer, but it is not.
I think it still is a skid steer. It is? Yeah. It's just a, it's not a bobcat. Just different brand than it used to. Yeah. Look at that. They've been using these big dumpsters to try and just compile everything in. And then the excavator, this is a serious excavator here. Actually, I know it looks a little bit weird now. They took the bucket off for actually more lifting capacity. He was saying that when they hauled the combine off, this thing was struggling. They had to bring in a big front end loader. And on top of all the cleanup, the rain started, which is great for the crops, but it just makes a big difference. mess out here. There's so many nails.
Look how chewed up the tracks are on this skid loader. And this is just his great neighbors coming in to help. Just let him use all his equipment. Here's all the tractor weights they saved from the fire. My goodness, the paint is just burned right off of them. Yeah. These things are heavy. Here's all the wheel spacers for the front duals. Here's his tool bench, some ramps. It's a solid bench. I'm telling you, man. Throw a new coat of paint on it, be good as new. My boots will survive anything. Does it work? No. Not really. Oh, hey, there you go. Boom. Good old vice grip. Oh, wow. It doesn't work anymore. The spring. Needs a new spring.
All the hitches, like, all that stuff's still in good shape. Just needs a new coat of paint, right? Sure. So, back here you can see the strip freshener. That all has brass bushings in it, so they're going to try to rebuild it. Should we go take a look at it? So I've been in the past couple hours out here with Mike, his wife, and just kind of walking around and seeing the rest of the property. It is extremely fortunate that the house didn't burn down. They have one of the more original buildings on the property. They have the coolest old barn. And so they're really grateful that those things didn't burn up. And so, you know, that's really, really nice.
But unfortunately, the building that did burn had all of the stuff in it. So that kind of sucks. gonna try to rebuild this. It's gonna take quite a few new parts but. . . The bones are still there. Here is all that's left of the combine. I had to take the chopper off so they could properly lift it onto the trailer. You can see the building right next to the shop. You can see the siding is melted. All of this happened. The insurance investigator ruled it was a battery cable that arced and everything was in the shed because there was a storm coming.
They wanted everything, they have a very nice building, they wanted everything to be protected from possible hail, wind, and battery cable, is what the investigator said, which is just crazy that something so small can cause so much destruction. I do wanna mention, because I saw a lot of comments about this on the last video, Farm Rescue has been contacted. So you might see me out here at this harvest with them. What do you think of this semi-truck, Laura? I really like it. It looks a little bit cooler than the semi-truck that you and I have. I would agree. I like the blue. I like the trailer.
See how much cool stuff I could bring home with that thing? Probably another military truck or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. We brought the low boy in to continue just kinda taking away the wreckage. But again, I just wanna say from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of everyone in my area's hearts, thank you so much for your generous support. Whether you donated, whether you just. . . watched the video, shared the story, anything like that. I do want to mention at the end you see that Grant and I are wearing these Laura Farm shirts that Bunker Branding helped us put together. Proceeds from these shirts will go to Mike and his family.
So if you are uncomfortable with giving money to GoFundMe or some other kind of thing like that, if you want a different way to help out his family, buy a shirt from Grant and I and I will just write Mike a check. So thank you again and we'll see you in the next one. They have gone! I'm a lawnmower, there it goes. .
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