HARDIN CO. – A situation involving irrigation, insurance, and farmland owned by Hardin County’s resident judge is back on the docket with a recent filing against Paul Lamar by the insurer.
Lamar, the judge in question, is actually a co-defendant in the action filed by COUNTRY Mutual Insurance; the other defendant is Dennis Seely, of Ridgway in Gallatin County, who in 2015 had an irrigation system business that installed the equipment that failed, causing the incident under litigation.
Seely, regular readers will recall, has been sued by Syngenta Seeds in Gallatin County as of January of this year, operating Double D Agri Solutions LLC.
Now, Seely is part of the Hardin action, which, by the sounds of it, is quite similar to the Gallatin one in terms of liability…because there doesn’t appear to be a really clear indication of what it was Seely is said to have done is actually what happened.
The incident in question occurred in 2015, according to court documents, when on March 13 of that year, Lamar had hired Seely Irrigation LLC to install a Reinke ElectroGator II Irrigation System for a cost of $77,287.42.
The system was described as “circular” in design, meaning that the water piping system, elevated above the field on wheeled braces, allowed the entire length of boom to rotate 360 degrees from a fixed pivot intended to be near the center of the field, and allowing the boom to irrigate the field by swinging completely around the pivot point.
Lamar claimed that the pivot wasn’t located in the center of the field, which caused the end part of the boom to swing past the boundary lines of his field and encroached on a neighbor’s field. So on December 31, 2015, Lamar and Seely reached an agreement that the whole thing would be modified with a Swing Arm Retro Kit, which ran Lamar another expense, an additional $19,558.68 on the circular system; and for the modifications, $38,900.
Meanwhile in a separate field, another Reinke irrigation system was put in for $95,000.
That particular system included a boom containing a water piping system elevated above the field on wheeled braces, intended to be programmed to provide “windshield” movement of the irrigation boom from a pivot, where it rotated slightly more than 90 degrees from a fixed pivot in the corner of the field. This allowed the boom to irrigate the field by crossing it, swinging back and forth with a windshield-wiper type motion over the field. On February 29, 2016, Lamar paid Seely $85,500 as an initial payment, with the remaining $9,500 to be due upon completion of the project, all of it to be done prior to planting time.
Lamar had hired local farmer Ben Moye to farm these two increasingly-expensive fields. On June 23, 2016, Moye contacted Dennis Seely to ask whether the windshield system was ready and could be used to irrigate the particular field where it was located. Seely said it was, and the system was activated.
When the boom arm began rolling across the field, however, it swung beyond the point where it was intended to stop, crashing into trees and other obstructions at the north edge of the field. The collision, naturally, damaged the windshield irrigation system.
Lamar subsequently sued Seely Irrigation, that suit being filed in Hardin County March 17, 2017, claiming Breach of Contract and Negligence against Seely resulting in not only crop loss for the year 2016 on a little 2.34 acres of farm land not utilized because the incident blocked access to that land, and damages in the amount of $125,792.73.
And while that was working its way through court, apparently, Seely also filed a claim with his insurance company, COUNTRY Mutual.
Because the coverage didn’t involve bodily injury and property damage during the incident, COUNTRY doesn’t believe they have to fulfill the terms of the claim, and they explain this painstakingly across several pages of the filing, which was submitted as a Miscellaneous Remedy (MR) case on April 26.
COUNTRY has named as respondents in the case both Seely and Judge Lamar.
There has been no upcoming court date set on the MR case in Hardin as of press time since the filing is so new.
Seely’s Gallatin County case is next set for a status on June 20, with Syngenta Seed, as plaintiffs, breathing down the necks of both Dennis and Daniel Seely over a claim they failed to pay in something akin to a pyramid scheme, which is what big ag has done to farming…along with subsidizing irrigation systems to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars a pop.
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