LOOKING TO HARVEST MORE THAN ILLICIT CROPS

As You Sow So Shall You Reap. Unless, of Course, You're One of the
Many Area Farmers Who Find a Little Something Extra in Their Fields:
Marijuana Plants.

For police departments, seizures of such plants are a regular
occurrence, as farmers continually discover the illicit crops growing
in among their cornfields. Last month, for instance, a three-day
blitz by a special drug unit made up of officers from the RCMP, the
OPP and the Waterloo Regional Police Service netted 5,000 plants in
Waterloo, Wellington and Perth counties. Half of the plants came from
this region.

"We have an ideal area for growing the marijuana so [grow operations]
could virtually be anywhere within our region and the rural areas,"
Sgt. Andy Harrington, head of the WRPS drug unit, told the Observer.

The three-day blitz came as a result of months of gathering anonymous
tips and analyzing historical and topographic data.

"Certainly outdoor grows are very common the majority of the
locations that we identified are all rural because the majority of it
is in corn or near watering sources," said Harrington.

The red flags of an indoor grow-op in a residential neighborhood --
i.e. little but periodic activity, windows blacked out or covered in
foil, spiking hydro levels -- are often easily identifiable. The same
cannot be said, however, of the outdoor grow-op. Locating marijuana
plants in a field of corn is much like finding a needle in a haystack.

"People who grow marijuana are pretty clever and the first thing
they're going to do is get far enough off the road onto private
property," said Sgt. Merv Knechtel, who heads the regional police's
Elmira detachment.

"It could happen and maybe it has happened where an officer has seen
a vehicle sort of abandoned at the side of the road, and as he's been
inquiring about the vehicle some people come walking out of a
cornfield and then that's certainly good evidence but it doesn't
happen on a regular basis."

In such grow operations a marijuana plant is generally earthed as a
seedling or clone shortly after the corn is planted. Before the corn
stalks get too high they are ripped out and replaced with their
marijuana counterparts. Surrounded by forest buffers and located away
from public areas, outdoor grow-ops are intended to avoid detection.

Depending on the size and caliber of the operation, an outdoor grow
can yield anywhere from 10 to 50 plants in one cornfield to 1,000 in
a forest clearing. With an approximate yield per plant of $1,500 to
$3,000 -- depending on the quality of the product and the technical
know-how of the grower -- an outdoor marijuana crop can be a
lucrative business venture with a limited risk factor.

"It's difficult to link them (growers) to the certain locations
because of the staffing requirements to do surveillance; sometimes
we'll get tips that there are persons that are going to harvest or
that they are growing so in that respect we can target those people
specifically, but then it's staffing intensive to conduct the
surveillance to take them to the locations," Harrington explained.

Often, even corn farmers themselves have no idea their fields are
being used for marijuana plants until they complete the final harvest.

"It's very difficult from the ground to find the plants in the corn.
The corn is six-to eight-feet high, if not more, so you just can't
see it," he said, noting aerial assistance is usually required.

While marijuana plants are difficult to detect from the ground the
reverse is true from the air. As a result, when searching for plants,
eradication squads are divided into a two-part unit: ground officers
are guided by overhead flight crews conducting random fly-overs. The
spotters in these fixed-wing planes or helicopters keep their eyes
peeled for suspicious patches in the middle of cornfields or
homogenous, low-lying foliage in the middle of a forest clearing.

Because plantation stakeouts are so expensive, they're often reserved
for the larger, commercial operations; when plant numbers hit the
thousands, police are typically dealing with organized crime.
Fortunately for drug squads, such operations are easily detected from
an overhead view and from this vantage point the process of weeding
out grow-ops becomes something of a domino effect.

"In between flying from specific location to specific location the
pilots and the spotters that were in the plane were identifying other
areas which we didn't have information on," said Harrington.

Once the marijuana plants are located by ground teams they are
uprooted and piled into a one-ton truck. Whereas, typically, small
quantities of marijuana are sent for incineration, the massive yields
of a major eradication mission are carted off and land-filled.

"When it's buried properly at these landfill sites it's virtually
useless. We're confident that at the land fill sites holes are dug
deep enough, and it's covered enough that someone would be hard
pressed to locate it in the landfill sites. Not only that but in very
short order, because it's still green and it hasn't been dried into a
usable product or harvested it would mold very quickly and become
unusable very quickly," said Harrington.

While a drug unit's eradication efforts might end with the
destruction of thousands of plants, they don't always lead to
criminal convictions. Still, officers take pride in knowing they
cleared marijuana from the fields and consequently the streets.

"The primary objective is to disrupt the flow of marijuana from
fields to the streets, that's number one," said Sgt. Cam Croal of the
RCMP's Kitchener detachment.

"If we gather sufficient evidence to secure charges, then we'll
certainly do that. But if we don't, then we don't, but we do take
satisfaction in getting the marijuana off the street."

Eradication of grow-ops translates into less time-consuming street
level investigations that often yield little results: from a police
perspective it's better to nip it in the bud.

"When we talk about in excess of four tons of marijuana, that's
significant and there's satisfaction that goes along with that,
because, again, it's additional investigations that we don't have to
conduct at the street level and to detect it in the community. That's
where the best bang for the buck is," said Croal.