Metal thefts frustrate local farmers

NEWBERRY SPRINGS - Joe Harter's irrigation unit would not start on Tuesday morning. With intentions of baling some of his hay crop on his farm in Newberry Springs, Harter rose early to move his irrigation equipment, but it just sat there, dead.

"At first I thought it was just the system," he said. He hoped a quick fix would get the unit and his day started.

Unfortunately, when Harter inspected the unit spanning the 120-acre field, he noticed a thick cable missing. The cable had copper wire inside of it.

"They come in the night, and they bring cutters," he said. "Every day, when you go out to the units, you have this fear that the wire is missing."

Metal thieves targeted two area farms this week - Harter's and a dairy in Helendale - ripping off copper wire from irrigation units and causing a combined $10,000 in damage and loss of property. Harter said the cabling he suspects the thieves made off with will cost him $3 per foot plus labor and the danger of losing some of his crops.

"When your ready to irrigate, you need the water then, especially on hot days like today," he said via phone from atop a tractor on Wednesday.

And as the days get longer and hotter, the problem appears to get worse. Harter said his equipment has been targeted five times. Other farmers have shared his frustration.

"It just seems like every week there's a new guy," he said.

Two years ago, Harter said, he rarely heard about a copper wire theft at a farm. However, over the past month and a half, the frequency has drastically increased. Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau, said reports of metal theft in rural areas doubled in 2005 and shot up another 400 percent in 2006. In the San Joaquin Valley, replete with agriculture, $5 million in metal theft and associated damage was reported in 2006.

However, Kranz said the problem is statewide and that statistics don't always contain the whole story.

"In a lot of counties, rural crimes, crimes against farms, aren't in separate categories. They are grouped into general theft," he said. "It's been a regrettably common problem around California."

Thieves, Kranz said, do not just target copper wire. The remoteness of many of the sites allow perpetrators to thoroughly clean out a farm of brass sprinkler heads, aluminum irrigation pipes and even the catalytic converters from vehicles.

Kranz said a demand for scrap metal from overseas has pushed the prices up in California. Joel Bowlin, an employee of Riverside Recycling in Riverside County, said copper in good condition can go for $250 to $300 a pound.

The problem has g rown enough to make Sacramento and the state legislature take notice. A bill, introduced into the state assembly and supported by the California Farmer's Bureau, will make it more difficult for recycling centers to accept stolen metal.

"There's more interest for people to make a quick dollar or two," Kranz said. "It's a tremendous headache, and we're hoping to stem the tide a little bit."

Danielle Rau, the director of rural crime prevention at the California Farmer's Bureau, said there is little farmers can do to protect themselves against theft. She said farmers should take extra time to make sure their property is secure by using gates and locking equipment and questioning any suspicious activity near their farms. However, sometimes there is just too much property to patrol.

"We don't have a one-acre construction site that we can fence in and set up security cameras in front of," she said. "It's really hard to surveil and protect vast expanses of land."

Harter agrees. He owns 12,000 acres and said if this keeps up, he might have to add alarms and locks to all his equipment. The problem is, he does not know exactly how.

"There is no way we can lock them," he said. "They're out in the middle of the field."