Once Easy Pickings, Farms Fight Back

Santa Paula rancher Bob Pinkerton has been ripped off by avocado rustlers more times than he can remember. But he still can be surprised at how brazen crop bandits can be.

Just last week, in the middle of the workday, two men backed a silver sedan into one of his orchards. While one served as the lookout, the other piled hundreds of the pear-shaped fruit into the car.

The thieves probably would have kept at it had it not been for quick-acting neighbors who alerted Pinkerton and triggered a call to Ventura County’s agricultural crime busters.

The Sheriff’s Department unit is one of a growing number in the state dedicated solely to combating agricultural crime. The two-man team scours the farmland in pursuit of those who prey on ranchers and bleed hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from the county’s $1-billion-a-year agricultural industry.

“We want the bad guys to know that they just can’t come in and steal from us,” said Pinkerton, who toured the crime scene with Deputy Jason Hendren.

The bandits had fled as soon as they were spotted, and only a pair of muddy tire tracks and a sea of broken stems remained as evidence of the noontime heist. At current prices, the haul probably cost Pinkerton at least $100--the threshold at which the thieves could go to prison under especially stringent state laws protecting farmers.

Agencies Launch Assault on Thieves

“We’re not going to catch them every time, but they are going to know this is a hard place to get into,” Pinkerton said. “The attitude in Ventura County has become, if you are going to come here and commit agricultural crime, you better be prepared to do the time.”

That tough-nosed approach is taking root in agricultural counties across California, as law enforcement agencies lead an all-out assault on a rural scourge battering farmers and ranchers at a time when many are struggling to stay afloat.

From San Joaquin to San Diego, crime rings routinely wipe out whole sections of orchards, often employing vehicles outfitted with heavy-duty shocks to support the weight of their illegal booty. Thieves also steal farm chemicals, aluminum irrigation pipe and even wind machines for resale on the black market.

In Imperial County, bandits swipe tractors and other farm equipment, driving them across the border and out of the reach of U.S. authorities. In the Central Valley, methamphetamine rings have targeted remote farming areas as a favorite place to set up clandestine labs.

Farmers fence their property, but bandits cut their way through. Farm groups offer rewards, but not enough people are calling to collect.

While it’s hard to calculate statewide losses, farm officials say they extend into the tens of millions of dollars each year. Some of the theft is by drug users or transients looking to turn a quick buck, officials say, while some smacks of organized crime.

“We have [thieves] come up from other places who, with two or three vanloads of people, can clean out an entire orchard in one night,” said Fresno County Sheriff’s Sgt. Frances Devins, president of California Rural Crime Prevention Task Force.

“That’s a farmer’s entire profit for one year,” she said. “Gone in one night.”

More Money, Personnel Assigned to Farm Crime

In Fresno and other agricultural counties, however, farmers and law enforcement leaders are fighting back.

About a third of California’s 58 counties now have law enforcement personnel dedicated to solving and preventing agricultural crimes, authorities say.

Law enforcement agencies in the San Joaquin Valley formed an eight-county task force in 1999 to battle rural crime. As part of that effort, Fresno County is receiving about $800,000 in state money this year to assign five detectives, a sergeant and two prosecutors full time to combating crop theft and other farm-related wrongdoing.

The statewide crime prevention task force twice a year offers a school to train law enforcement officers on rural crime prevention, while the California Farm Bureau runs a Farm Watch program, which employs a Neighborhood Watch approach to preventing fruit and cattle theft. The Farm Bureau, the California Avocado Commission and other groups also offer rewards of up to $1,000 to tipsters who turn in agricultural rustlers.

In Ventura County, the state’s 10th-largest agricultural producer, rural crime fighters have been on the job since 1992.

Back then, the agricultural community lobbied hard for beefed-up enforcement, concerned that thieves were stealing with abandon. In some years, bandits were able to pull nearly $1 million in fruit and farm products from the county’s fields and orchards as fighting agricultural theft took a back seat to more high-profile crimes.

The Sheriff’s Department’s agricultural crimes unit has been instrumental in curbing the rural assault, evolving over the years from a crime prevention program to an aggressive investigative team that handles every farm-related crime in the department’s jurisdiction--from illegal dumping and crop theft to pilfered farm equipment and cockfighting.

There were 111 such incidents reported last year totaling $305,000 in losses. But Deputy Hendren and partner Don Jennings recovered nearly half of that amount, leading to 65 arrests and convictions in all but two cases.

“A lot of farmers don’t want to report these crimes because they are either too busy working and don’t have time to wait for a deputy to come out and take a report or they feel like it’s a waste of their time,” said Hendren, the son of a Santa Clara Valley citrus and avocado rancher who joined the agricultural unit a year and a half ago.

“We’re fortunate in this unit in that we can look into each and every case that comes to us,” Hendren said. “We want them to know that there is somebody out there for them, that it’s important to the department, and that we are going to take it seriously.”

The deputies are battling more than the bad guys.

Farmers Told to Take More Precautions

In an agricultural county where suburbia is pushing ever closer to farmland, they are trying to cut down on crimes of opportunity by convincing farmers that they can no longer afford to keep the keys in their tractors and their barn doors unlocked.

They also are trying to change public attitudes. Some people see no problem with stopping by the roadside and helping themselves to a bag of fruit. They don’t realize that they are stealing from farmers who are finding it increasingly difficult to make a profit, as rising production costs and other pressures chip away at what once was the county’s dominant industry.

“For a lot of these operations, it’s a break-even proposition,” said Jennings, a senior deputy who transferred from fugitive-warrant detail to the agricultural crimes unit two years ago. “So even a small amount of theft can push them from the black into the red.”

That is why every crime is taken so seriously. Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Tom Connors handles all of the county’s agricultural crimes and said his office prosecutes every case, even if it involves stealing a couple of dollars of fruit. Penalties range from fines for misdemeanor offenses to prison time if the haul is large enough and other aggravating circumstances apply.

Jennings and Hendren drive home the same message whenever they meet with growers or talk to farm groups.

The department offers a program in which five-digit identification numbers are assigned to farmers and ranchers and posted on their properties. Growers can carve the IDs into farm equipment in case it is stolen, and deputies can use the numbers to easily identify properties while on patrol or when responding to a call.

The deputies also provide their pager and cell phone numbers to farmers and last month set up an e-mail account, ag.crimes@mail.co .ventura.ca.us, to speed their ability to share information.

Deep in the Santa Clara Valley, the county area hit hardest by agricultural crime, Santa Paula resident Suzanne Savard caught a trio of avocado thieves.

She was driving down the road one evening last August when she spotted a van parked in a Santa Paula orchard. Because she grew up on an avocado ranch, she thought the vehicle looked out of place. Suddenly, three men took off running, and Savard dialed 911 and tailed them until deputies arrived.

Turns out, they had stolen 160 pounds of avocados--enough to charge them with a felony. They were convicted of misdemeanors and were sentenced to 30 days in jail and ordered to pay $180 in restitution to the grower.

Hendren and Jennings joined Farm Bureau officials last week in presenting Savard with a $1,000 reward for her vigilance.

“Keep up the good work,” Farm Bureau President Edgar Terry said as he handed over the check. “Maybe this will be a good incentive for people to keep an eye out.”

At Bob Pinkerton’s Santa Paula ranch, he’s got his own set of incentives.

When bandits raid one of his orchards, he loses more than just the cost of the fruit. He spends thousands of dollars an acre on watering and fertilizing his crop and protecting it from frost. He pays his taxes on the property and waits a year to arrive at the moment when the fruit is ready to be picked.

So that last thing he wants is to walk into one of his groves and see nothing but stems where avocados should be.

“You just know you’ve got to be constantly on the watch for it,” he said. “It’s all part of the job when you’re in agriculture. If somebody comes in and thinks they’ve found a gold mine, they’ll keep coming back to it. We want to get across the idea in this county that this is not a very good place to come and steal.”