Elderly Farmer Grows Cannabis by Mistake

A 74-year old farmer in a small town in southern Germany who had intended to grow sunflowers says he planted more than 1,000 cannabis shrubs by mistake.

Alarmed by worried locals, German police visited the man on Tuesday and had him destroy the unusual crop on his one-acre field, which the man normally uses to grow potatoes.

Drug enforcement officials found a field of 10-feet high cannabis plants in the small town of Moembris, in the southern state of Bavaria.

Police officials told NBC News that the man told the astonished officers he had scattered half a sack of old bird seed and was surprised to see the tall, strange looking plants grow quickly, but did not realize that he had cultivated cannabis.

"The friendly elderly gentleman was surprised at the strange plants that had grown next to the flowers but did not identify them as cannabis plants," a police statement said.

"The farmer promptly ploughed up the field with the tractor under the watchful eyes of the police," police spokesman Stefan Brabetz told NBC News.

In a press release, officials indicated that the type of cannabis was too weak to have intoxicating effect and could not have led to addiction.

"Nevertheless, the case is being presented to the local prosecutor’s office and a judge will have to decide whether formal charges need to be filed or not," Stefan Brabetz said.

Under German law, it is a crime to "knowingly" grow cannabis.

ya people in the us don't realize that in the rest of the world hemp seeds are in cereals and breads, they are very healthy, lots of omega 3's...they are also a primary seed in birdseeds, and this kind of thing happens all the time...i think in a lot of countries the seeds need to be steralized so they wont grow, but obviously these had not. he scattered his mixed birdseed and of course the hemp outgrew the sunflowers...hemp is just hemp though...

i don't think it's even newsworthy really, there are millions of huge hemp plants in my small town alone, the entire midwest is covered in feral hemp leftover from hemp farming back in the day...it grows along every major road, in every ditch, alongside every cornfield, it can make it very very hard to grow pot outdoors, everywhere you look there are fields of males pissing pollen...you hike deep into the woods to get away from them and even then you randomly find singular 18 inch males scattered in the forest, just a few sunleaves, and a few tiny flowers, but just enough to turn my fall harvest into a bag of birdseed if im not careful...