Night Watch, in cannabis

The cannabis plants aren't quite ready to harvest, but they are mature enough to steal.

Thieves are casing the farm with drones. 

It is the wild west. It is 2:00 a.m. and I am guarding my crop. If I encounter trouble I think I will be OK. I am armed with a flashlight and cell phone.

The melon crop is easy by comparison. The midsummer hailstorm flattened the plants. Hailstones the size of ping pong balls made the plants look as if they had been crushed by car tires. Yet some of the plants bounced back, so I had a small crop, just enough to give a few away, cantaloupes, Santa Claus melons, and watermelons. There is no money in melons. The farmer gets nearly the same price today as I got when I was in high school 55 years ago selling melons to Blunt's Ranch Market on old Highway 99 and to Sherm's Thunderbird Market on West Main Street.

Melons were a business for me; I made tuition money. Now it is a hobby. I grow them to give away. A very good vine ripe melon is as complex and nuanced a flavor experience as is a fine wine, but harder to experience. Melons are seasonal, perishable and they have the extra dimension of texture to get exactly right. I am a melon snob, and I wish melon snobbery caught on, but it has not. People who are fussy about their wines eat bad melons and don't know any better. 

I also show farm visitors how a watermelon sounds when it crunches to the ground and what it is like to eat the heart of a dropped melon. Melons are fun.  I like having farm guests

Crunch

. 

I don't like having farm thieves. They are out there, right now. Three times in the past four days workers have heard a buzzing in the air. They are employees of registered growers who have leased land from me. Each drone was different, presumably owned by different people. The drones  hovered over the cannabis crop. They went up and down the rows, low to the ground, out of reach but close enough to the plants that their cameras could see exactly how far along the plants are. When hovering higher up, they could scope out the farm roads, the various ways into the property, the closed (and locked) gates. They could count the number of workers. 

The operators of the first drone stood at a vacant parking lot of a nearby country church, the old Table Rock School. A neighbor who saw the drone got into his car and caught up to them as they stuffed the drone into a black Silverado. The drone operators had removed the front and back license plates from their truck. The truck sped off. The neighbor followed them two miles until they stopped at the parking lot of the Lower Table Rock trailhead. They got out and in a menacing way approached the neighbor, who took photos of them from the presumed safety of his car. but left without confronting them. 

This needs to be said: No guns were displayed or brandished. There wasn't a shootout.

Cannabis regulation by the Oregon and federal authorities is extraordinarily complex. There is plenty of law enforcement as regards registering cannabis grows and collecting taxes, but there is grossly inadequate law enforcement as regards theft. A cannabis grow-site a few feet from my property was robbed last year. The thieves got a vehicle stuck in a ditch and had to abandon it at the scene of the crime--a slam dunk place to start a criminal investigation, one would think. The county sheriff's department examined the stuck vehicle, said the car's owner lived eight miles away, but that they do not investigate cannabis thefts. We were on our own. "But we are taxpayers and property owners. The crop is registered, has permits. Don't we get the protection of the law?" The deputy sheriff said no, that as they saw it, all he had was an abandoned vehicle case.

So here I am, at the farm, a night watchman, guarding the eight plants that I grow. These eight are not "Medical Marijuana." They are grown under a different set of complex rules regarding personal use allowed for owners and residents of Exclusive Farm Use zoned parcels. The drones hovered over my parcels, too. I am physically close to the plants, awake, frequently going out to observe the plants and check for people, lights, and sounds. All quiet so far. My farmhouse is lit up. I am trying to communicate that someone is here, on the job, alert.

I have placed tracking devices in all eight plants. Thieves who would take an hour to disassemble each cannabis plant for a careful harvest would eventually notice and disable the devices, but the reality of a theft of cannabis here at the farm would most likely be a "smash and grab." They would steal the whole plant and stick it into a big van, truck, or trailer, dealing with it the way one would deal with a large, thick Christmas tree. Get in, get out. As soon as the plant and GPS tracking device move, I will be alerted and the tracking device will follow the thieves. The Jackson County sheriff department may not investigate the theft of cannabis, but maybe they would be willing to investigate the theft of my tracking device. Will law enforcement in fact investigate?  I don't know, but presumably the thieves would not know either, or would prefer not to risk that they would.

My hope is that the professionally-made signs alerting thieves of the presence of GPS trackers will discourage them. I am presuming thieves would not want to be tracked. People in a rural Oregon cannabis environment tend to be armed. The thieves don't know whether I am one of them or have friends who are. My wife asked me what I planned to do if I stepped outside the farm house and saw a caravan of people robbing me. I said I planned to turn the car headlights onto high beam, to point a very bright portable spotlight onto them, to hit the "panic" button on my car keys that starts loud honking, and to photograph them with my cell phone camera. I said I hoped that would chase them off. They would presume with all that racket that I would have called 911 and that police or fire people or someone would be showing up. I promised her I would not engage them in a gunfight. 

It is 4:00 a.m., the time I normally get up.

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