Maybe it was because of the warm, sunny weather. Or maybe a down job market has people looking to make ends meet through illicit cultivation.
Whatever the reason, police in Washington County found a bumper crop of marijuana last week when a State Police helicopter helped them locate pot parcels in Easton, Cambridge and Hebron.
Officers from seven law enforcement agencies pulled up 1,700 plants in two days, the beginning of an annual late-summer effort to pull up illegal marijuana crops.
Jeff Murphy, senior investigator with the Washington County District Attorney's Office and coordinator of the county drug task force, said police believe this year's crop was one of the biggest in recent years.
"They pulled up some plants that were 14 feet tall with stalks like trees," Murphy said. "Ninety percent of these were mature plants. They said this was the best crop they had seen."
The plants amounted to 1,746 pounds of pot, which was burned at the Hudson Falls trash plant late last week, police said. The plants generally each produce about $2,000 worth of marijuana when mature, Murphy said.
One of the areas where police pulled up plants last week was the stretch of farmland near Lees Crossing Road in Easton and Cambridge that police have been searching in recent days for a man accused of dragging a state trooper with a pickup truck.
Officials said there is no known connection between the suspect, Abel Jimenez, and the pot crop removed from the area.
Washington County Sheriff Roger Leclaire said the helicopter crew members were finding plants from the air as they headed to areas that police planned to search for the suspect.
"We found it in locations that weren't even mentioned," he said.
Murphy said a summer that saw good growing conditions likely played a part in the size and number of plants that police found. Marijuana is a tropical plant that needs sun and heat to grow well, conditions that were abundant most of the summer.
No arrests were made in connection with the plants, but the investigations were continuing, police said.
Murphy said police plan additional helicopter flights to check over other parts of the county in the coming weeks. The marijuana growing season typically stretches well into September, and growers look to bring their crops in shortly before the first frost.
The illicit marijuana harvest in Washington County has dwindled over the years from a time in the late 1980s and early 1990s when police annually pulled up more than 10,000 plants. Increased enforcement, including use of helicopters and airplanes for fly-overs, and an improvement of indoor growing techniques has changed the way pot growers operate.
Officers from the Washington County Sheriff's Office, Cambridge-Greenwich Police, Hudson Falls Police, State Police, state Department of Environmental Conservation, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and state Division of Parole took part in the effort.
Police in Saratoga and Warren counties typically pull up a few hundred plants a year as well. Saratoga County Undersheriff Mike Woodcock said police had found parcels in Hadley and Galway so far this year, while Warren County officials plan their fly-overs in the coming weeks.
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