Iron harvest

[2] In the Ypres Salient, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other during World War I were duds, and most of them have not been recovered.

[citation needed] According to its website, DOVO, the demining unit of the Belgian armed forces, defused more than 200 tons of ammunition in 2019.

Most of the iron harvest is found during the spring planting and autumn ploughing, as the regions of northern France and Flanders are rich agricultural areas.

[5] Two died handling munitions outside Vimy, France, as recently as 1998, and in 2014 two Belgian construction workers were killed when they encountered an unexploded shell buried for a century.

[9] In Belgium, munitions and wartime iron harvested by farmers are carefully placed around field edges or in gaps in telegraph poles, where they are regularly collected by the Belgian army for disposal by controlled explosion at a specialist center in Poelkapelle.