Sonoma County drug agents, working with the state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, just two weeks into the season already have seized more pot plants than in all of last year.
So says Sonoma County Sheriff's Sgt. Chris Bertoli, who runs the county's Narcotics Task Force, which over six days in the past 12 destroyed 150,667 immature plants.
The county task force last year seized 108,486 plants with CAMP and another 40,000 on its own, he said.
Three days in June with CAMP personnel yielded 145,467 plants from raids near The Geysers, Lake Sonoma and the Red Slide area of Mill Creek, Bertoli said.
The task force on its own destroyed another 5,200 plants found on private lands, including in a vineyard, working without additional personnal or CAMP air support.
The combined 150,667 plants, if allowed to grow, could have yielded smokable bud worth an estimated $300 million, assuming each plant produced a pound of usable pot, Bertoli said.
"For the most part it's $2,000 a pound up in this area," he said.
It's still unclear how 2010 seizures will compare with last year's record-busting take of 4.5 million plants during the state CAMP season.
But the North Coast counties of Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt and Sonoma counties together accounted for about a quarter of CAMP seizures last year, or about 1.2 million plants. Lake and Mendocino counties respectively finished in second and third place in terms of overall counts.
"There's a lot of dope out there," said Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputy Jim Wells, who's assigned to his county's Marijuana Eradication Team, which seized 123,302 plants of its own this week, working with CAMP personnel. "I'd say we had a good week."
Lake County law enforcement officers similarly projected seizures of about 100,000 plants over several days with CAMP personnel last week, sheriff's Capt. Jim Bauman said.
CAMP last year reported more than 500,000 plant seizures in Lake County - second only to Shasta County, which had 557,862.
Mendocino County ran third, with 440,689. Sonoma County, with 108,486, ranked 13th.
CAMP, which is run out of the state Bureau of Narcotics, mounted a 102-day season last year working with law enforcement officers in various counties to try to limit overall production.
County personnel typically run advance aerial surveillance to locate large marijuana gardens so their limited number of days with CAMP assistance are focused strictly on eradication - a sometimes cumbersome, time-consuming operation that requires inserting people into remote gardens via helicopter long line and - when the plants are more mature — hauling them out.
Large production gardens are easy to see by air because cultivators tend to clear large areas of natural vegetation, Wells said.
"They clean out the foliage, and it's pretty distinctive if you're up in the air and you're looking down," he said.
When the plants are still as young as they are now, without any buds growing yet, he said, officers can simply yank them out, snap them and leave them at the site.
Once they're mature, the plants have to be stacked and hauled from the gardens — however remoted and rugged the terrain - and destroyed elsewhere.
Representatives for CAMP, which is run out of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, attribute its ever-increasing seasonal take to improved efficiency and methods, as well as ever-larger, more numerous pot gardens.
The proliferation of garden operations run by Mexican organized crime syndicates has contributed greatly to beefed up production, Bertoli said.
"There's just more being grown," agreed Bertoli. "We're getting more calls from landlords and neighbors who are just kind of fed up with it."
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