What the deuce is this nonsense?

This isn't my code, but it was written by a consulting company we brought in quite some time ago. They worked on some automation code, that was supervised by someone else. Neither that person, nor the consulting company work with us anymore.

It appears they did some work on the site I am currently building out. I found dozens of instances of code like the following, and I have to shake my head in wonder as to what they were thinking.

cropAcreValue = cropAcreValue.toString().toInteger()
if (QA_submittedBy.toString().trim().equalsIgnoreCase('')) {

I can't even begin to understand how they thought this was a good idea.

I know my code isn't very good at times, but at least I'm not writing stuff like that and committing it to Master.