MARIJUANA FARM SURPRISES TOWN

CANADA - The folks who live near the northern Ontario farm where police
found 21,000 neatly planted marijuana stalks this month said there was
something funny about the operation from the start.

For one thing, most of the hardy people who choose to live near this
paper-mill town north of Toronto know each other.

But the new owners who moved in this year were outsiders from Toronto
who kept to themselves. They were Chinese, didn't speak English, and,
as far as any of the neighbors could tell, they became invisible once
they took possession of the land. There was not even a tractor on the
farm.

Some, such as Kim Frank and Joey Larose who grow grain on the farm
next door, said they had no idea that they were living beside the
largest outdoor marijuana-growing operation ever discovered in Ontario.

But others had their suspicions.

"My mom," Frank said, "she was the one who figured out there was
something going on."

When she voiced her concerns at a family gathering this month, she was
told she had an overactive imagination. The next day, the police
cruisers were tearing down the dirt road outside their home and
helicopters were flying overhead.

"Big apologies to Kim's mom," Larose said.

Another neighbor who did not want his name printed said he knew there
was something going on in the fields behind the baby-blue two-story
farmhouse.

"You get ... (people) moving up here, can't speak a word of English
." he said. "A couple of years ago it was the same thing in
Matheson. There was one in Moonbeam two months ago and another in
Terrace Shores two weeks after that."

But the arrests - and the size of the seizure - were still shocking.
Around town, the news was on everyone's lips. And some tried to get
out to the field before it was torn up just to get a glimpse of the
operation. They were stopped in their tracks by the police.

It was one more irritant for officers on the scene who had their hands
full, ripping up thousands of the short, bushy marijuana plants and
arresting the man they believe to have planted them - 40-year-old Zhi
Ji Chu of Toronto.

Police detective Bill O'Shea said the growers had gone to some effort
to plant the marijuana in mounds to make them look like potatoes, and
that the crop was meticulously cared for. "There wasn't a weed in the
field."

Investigators said marijuana growers are looking to isolated regions
of the north with increasing frequency. The summer days are warm and
the nights are cool. The clay soil can be enriched to create an ideal
medium for the hardy plants. And the producers have been testing new
strains to determine which ones grow best in the northern climate.

It's a multimillion-dollar business, O'Shea said - one that has become
a favorite enterprise of criminal gangs.

"We have Asian organized crime, we have motorcycle gangs, we have
traditional Mafioso-type gangs," he said. "We're not immune and I
think that's the thing that's a wake-up call for the northerners."