Growers Put the Squeeze on Avocado Thefts

Avocado thievery has reached such epidemic proportions in northern San Diego County that a statewide avocado commission is planning to contract with the county Sheriff’s Department to help stem the rustling of the fruit known as green gold.

Sheriff’s officials said they at first didn’t understand the scope of the problem, but, now that they do, after having met with industry representatives, they have entered contract negotiations with the quasi-governmental California Avocado Commission, which wants three deputies assigned full-time to work on the problem.

The preliminary plan calls for deputies not only to patrol North County’s groves day and night to deter thieves, but to establish sting operations to try to nab thieves attempting to sell hot avocados to packing houses and farmers markets.

The deputies would fill new positions to be financed by the Avocado Commission. The commission already has allocated $197,000 to fund the program in San Diego County, part of a $743,000 campaign statewide that is funded by avocado growers to battle the increasing problem.

Avi Crane, a commission spokesman, said $10 million worth of fruit was stolen last year--about half of that from San Diego County groves--and the losses are expected to increase this year because of the high price that avocados fetch at the market.

Growers now receive 80 cents to $1 per pound for avocados at wholesale packing houses, and Crane said thieves are willing to get 50 cents on the dollar for their stolen fruit.

Some thieves brazenly walk into groves by daylight, secrete themselves in the midst of the trees and walk off hours later toting burlap bags, each containing 90 pounds of avocados, growers say. Others will make their forays under cover of darkness, and their presence will not be discovered until the next morning when a grower sees his stripped trees--or perhaps not for days or weeks, when the absentee owner finally inspects his trees.

“We have no compensation once the fruit is taken. We have no insurance, and we don’t get a tax write-off,� said Ed Holtz, who has hired private security guards to patrol his 50-acre avocado grove in Valley Center 12 hours a night.

“Even if they eventually find stolen fruit, we can’t prove it’s ours,� he said. “The stolen fruit still gets in the marketplace, the middleman still gets his cut, and we get nothing.�

Earlier this year, authorities in Riverside County arrested 10 people and seized more than 11,000 pounds of stolen avocados that were being stored in Temecula, awaiting distribution to wholesale and retail markets. Authorities estimate that 10,000 pounds of stolen avocados daily were being moved by the ring.

How does the 42-year-old Holtz, who has been growing avocados 20 years, measure the monetary loss of avocados through theft last year? “It was enough money that I could otherwise have bought a new car. A nice new car.�

Holtz hired private security guards two months ago, after 3,000 pounds of avocados were stripped off his trees on each of back-to-back nights, costing him $6,000 in lost revenue.

Holtz is now paying $1,000 a week for the security service, but he figures that he has to spend some money to save even more. And, although the unarmed guards are now routinely chasing would-be thieves off his property, the thieves haven’t stopped trying.

Last Tuesday, Holtz said, the guards ran thieves off his groves. But, on Thursday, Holtz discovered a cache of empty burlap bags that had been dropped off that day in a field across from his groves on Circle R Drive, apparently for a theft attempt that night. Indeed, early Friday morning his guards heard--but couldn’t see--men in the groves trying to take fruit off the trees. For the second time that week, they were chased off the property.

Holtz says he doesn’t ask his guards to capture the thieves--partly because it would be too dangerous and partly because he doesn’t want to lose time in court when he needs to be in the groves working. Even if one particular group of men were caught red-handed, Holtz figures, they would never be held behind bars because of the crowded jails and, besides, the avocado ringleaders would simply hire other people to do the job.

Sighs Holtz, “I pick my trees in the day; they pick them at night. It’s like a cat-and-mouse game because they know I won’t stay out there all day and all night, so they’ll wait until I go inside for the night.�

There was a time, Holtz said, when he would go back into the groves and hide, hoping to deter thieves who were sure to arrive. But his wife became so worried for his safety--other growers have been assaulted by thieves they confronted--that Holtz hired the security guards instead.

“Chain-link fences won’t keep them out, because they’ll cut right through them. I’ve had chains and locks to my gate cut by bolt cutters,� Holtz said. “Some of the guards are Marines who tell me it’s too bad I can’t use some of the security devices they’ve seen at Camp Pendleton because they would work for me. But, of course, I don’t have access to military security devices.�

Even all the security in the world might not deter thefts, Holtz said.

“I’ve seen trucks inside of groves with the gates locked behind them, which tells me they already had a key to the gate and let themselves in. They could be men who work for the irrigators who have keys to the property, or people who have access to the grove managers’ keys to the property.�

Some grove owners--especially those who don’t live on the property and who own the grove simply as an investment or revenue source--might not ever miss the fruit and know they’ve been hit because they don’t personally monitor their trees, industry officials say.

The Avocado Commission had a pre-existing, annual $283,000 anti-theft campaign statewide, including programs to investigate wholesale and retail markets for evidence of stolen fruit, and a $50,000 reward fund for persons who report thefts to authorities.

But, on March 15, the commission voted to authorize another $460,000 statewide--including the nearly $200,000 in San Diego County--for the hiring of law enforcement officers to specifically deal with avocado thievery.

Myron Klippert, a San Diego County sheriff’s commander, said officials were at first ignorant about how serious avocado thievery was, since much of it had gone unreported to authorities--perhaps because, by then, the damage already had been done and growers felt there was no point.

Klippert says he has now learned how serious the problem is and is sympathetic to the growers, with whom he is negotiating a contract tailored to attack the avocado problem.

“These thieves are getting pretty good at what they’re doing,� he said. “They won’t even pick the fruit at the edge of a grove. They’ll go into the interior and strip the trees absolutely clean.

“Some show up with 40-foot trailers in the middle of the night. Other guys will go to a street corner where migrant workers are standing around, give them burlap bags and tell them, “I’ll meet you at 2 and pay you $30 each if those bags are full of avocados.�

The migrant workers may believe they’re being hired by the grove owner or manager and have no sense that they’re participating in a crime, he said.

Sometimes, avocados are simply taken from large wooden bins already filled with picked fruit that are placed in groves or near the road, ready to be picked up by the packing house the next morning.

The larger packing houses say they don’t believe stolen fruit moves through their doors. Some packing houses are cooperatives, owned by the growers themselves, and accept only that fruit that is known to come from one of the members.

Other packing houses say they don’t pay cash for fruit--in itself a deterrent to thieves, who want to unload their hauls, get the cash and run.

“Most of the people we deal with, we’ve known for years,� said Tim Hanify, director of field operations for Eco Farms, a regional packing house in Temecula. “If we get someone we don’t know, we’ll find out from him where his grove is, how many trees he has and his mailing address. And we won’t send him a check for a month, which will give us time to check him out and make sure he is who he says he is.

“It’s the general feeling in the industry that the stolen fruit is ending up with the smaller, cash buyers,� he said.

Growers like Holtz say they hope the avocado cops will help their plight. “But sting operations won’t necessarily help us,� he said. “From the growers’ point of view, we have to catch these guys in our fields, and that won’t be easy.�