Business
5 Crazy Cannabis Farm Busts
Cannabis
Island. Sounds like your dream “canna-cation,” right? For now, it’s the moniker
being used to refer to
a 21,500 square foot floating cannabis farm that was recently busted off the
co
[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]C[/dropcap]annabis Island. Sounds like your dream “canna-cation,” right? For now, it’s the moniker being used to refer to a 21,500 square foot floating cannabis farm that was recently busted off the coast of Russia.
Ah yes, anyone who has grown the plant, legally or otherwise, knows that its cultivation requires a healthy dose of creativity—especially if you’re, you know, going around the law. And that means growers, like those who created Cannabis Island, need to be super inventive when it comes to where they set up shop.
Luckily,it’s getting a little bit easier to legally grow in some U.S. states and foreign countries. However, cannabis farming is still a risky business. To drive the point home, here are some of the craziest, most brazen lengths growers have gone to in order to yield their bud.
Cannabis farmers in the barren Baja California Desert crafted a 300 acre black net throw over their cannabis planation—which is now the largest recorded farm bust in Mexico’s history.
Tennessee is known for its vast network of caves, so it only makes sense that growers in The Volunteer State would create their own cavern under their home in order to create a hydroponic grow house. The football-field-long cave is said to have produced 1,000 plants—$6 to $8 million dollars worth of cannabis per year—before it was busted in 2005.
Police load evidence into a truck after a large cannabis grow operation was discovered in the factory basement. MICHAEL GRAAE/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Cherry King was once a maraschino cherry factory operating in Brooklyn, New York. Its basement was also home to a 2,500 square-foot cannabis farm, the biggest ever for the city. For years it went undiscovered—the official plans for the factory did not include any subterranean space. But local beekeepers began complaining that their critters were creating red-dyed honey, leading the Department of Environmental Conservation to investigate. After numerous inspections, nothing was found. But in early 2015, they finally noticed a rolling shelf that was magnetized to the wall. They pulled it away and uncovered the farm.
Lazarat Albania (population 2,810) was a Wild West sort of town in southern Albania. As such, it was once one of Europe’s largest cannabis producers—at one time, officials claimed that Lazarat produced $6.1 billion dollars worth of cannabis in a year. It was never a huge secret, but in 2014, a 5 day raid on the village, uncovered 25.4 tons of bud and a whopping 91,000 plants, permanently shutting down the town/ grow op.
The forest canopy provides natural camo for any cannabis-growing operation but it wasn’t enough to stop a two week raid on Mendocino National Forest—which is roughly the size of Rhode Island—in July 2011. Federal and local law enforcement agents uncovered 460,000 plants in over 50 gardens after local hikers began complaining about armed guards in the wilderness.
