It's harvest season in Kings County, and they're out there -- fruit, vegetable and nut crops, hanging off trees or plants, ready for the picking. Or the stealing.

People have always helped themselves to the bounty on Kings County's vast acreages when nobody was looking, but officials fear that recession could make this year worse than usual.

The first significant incident reported to sheriff's deputies happened about three weeks ago in an apricot orchard in the vicinity of 6th and Elder avenues.

About 15 people picking the fruit without permission scattered when a crew hired by the landlord to prune the orchard showed up, said Darin Pearson, supervisor of the rural crime unit.

"We've heard of this type of activity happening in other counties already," Pearson said.

Pearson's gut instinct tells him that much of the stolen food ends up at roadside stands and swap meets.

Stands are required to have permits and show where they got their produce. But stolen crops are hard to track and receipts are easy to forge, making it almost impossible to eliminate what amounts to almost a fact of life in Kings County's vast open spaces.

Many farmers have resigned themselves to the occasional unauthorized picker.

Bill Tos, who owns the apricot orchard mentioned above, said the theft occurred after much of the crop had already been harvested.

"We didn't get really excited about it," he said.

That process, called gleaning, doesn't upset some if it happens after the field has already been harvested.

Often, people ask permission. But sometimes things get out of hand.

For example, when almonds and walnuts have been shaken off the trees and are lying in neat rows on the ground, ready to be machine-collected, thieves sometimes come at night and shovel hundreds or thousands of dollars worth into sacks.

At Stone Land Company on the Westside, thieves have pulled pickup trucks up to garbanzo bean fields and driven off with hundreds of pounds.

The company dug 4-foot-deep ditches all around the fields to keep the trucks from backing up right to the crop, said Tony Azevedo, manager and partner.

Azevedo instructs his night patrolmen not to confront thieves openly, but rather to get license plate numbers and report the theft to the sheriff's office.

Such thefts haven't had a big economic impact on the company -- yet.

"With unemployment the way that it's going, I perceive that it's going to get worse," Azevedo said.

Deterrence is difficult.

Azevedo said four night watchmen patrol different sections of the ranch at night "just making it known that we are present, we are around."

But even if they come across somebody stealing, it's tough to get license plate numbers as the alerted thieves roar off into the darkness.

The sheriff's department would love to get surveillance equipment that could gather evidence at night from a distance.

They could set it up, say, near the sight of reported thefts of crops or equipment.

Such technology is used in military applications, and some of it is employed on the virtual fence that spans sections of the U.S.-Mexico border.

But it is prohibitively expensive, Pearson said.And for Azevedo, the vast size of Stone Land Co. just about rules out monitoring devices as a crop-theft deterrent.

"We've got so many acres, I don't think it would be cost effective," he said.

As far as the rural crimes unit, going after ag theft remains a top priority.

But for many local growers, particularly when it comes to crop theft, unauthorized dipping into their cornucopia remains an unavoidable fact of life.

"I think the farmers will say this is always a problem," Pearson said.

The reporter can be reached at 583-2432.

(June 23, 2009)