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Thieves Flying Off With Rain Birds

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By JAN HOLLINGSWORTH, The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 27, 2007

Updated: 10/25/2007 08:59 pm

PLANT CITY - For weeks now, the delicate seedlings have been arriving from Canada.

They come packed in foam coolers and are quickly plugged into the plastic-covered beds that blanket thousands of acres in eastern Hillsborough County.

The sprinklers have been working overtime to keep the young plants moist and cool, splashing great arcs of water across the fields throughout the day.

All crops live and die by irrigation, but it is especially critical to newly set strawberries as the young plants take root.

'If you don't cool those plants - in one day, they're dead,' said Bo Dunlap, manager of James Irrigation, a company that has been supplying the area's strawberry growers for about 30 years.

This year is different, though: Someone has been stealing thousands of sprinkler heads right out of the fields. Dunlap is selling replacements to growers as fast as he can get them in.

'I've completely cleaned out the inventory of two companies,' he said. 'Right now I'm out of sprinklers.'

To date, Dunlap has sold more than 10,000 sprinkler heads in 2007 - nearly double last year's numbers. Still, he finds little reason to celebrate.

'I wish I could give every one of those farmers their money back,' he said. 'It's driving them nuts.'

The growers pay as much as $20 for a brass sprinkler the thieves unload as scrap metal at $1.50 a pound.

'They're costing us a whole lot more than the value of the Rain Bird,' grower Carl Grooms said.

Some thieves kick the heads off of the irrigation system, breaking the PVC pipes.

'The worst part is, when they break the pipe, they have to dig it up and fix the pipes, too. That's costing the farmers a lot of money in time and labor,' said Hillsborough County sheriff's Sgt. Wayne New, whose agricultural investigators have been working the farm theft cases.

Then there is the potential crop damage, which authorities estimate could run in the millions.

'You don't have but a number of minutes to get those Rain Birds going or you can have plant damage,' said Grooms, who discovered many of his sprinkler heads had gone missing from his Springhead fields one weekend in September. He never saw them again.

'You don't really realize they're missing until you crank them up and they're all shooting up in the air,' he said.

Dover grower Ronnie Young was hit twice in September at his Sydney-Washer Road farm. Thieves made off with more than 200 sprinklers in the dead of night the first time around.

'The second time, a neighbor saw lights in the field and called us but they were gone by the time we got there,' Young said. So were nearly 300 more sprinklers.

Two days later, deputies arrested 22-year-old Gonzalo Enriquez Rodriguez when he tried to sell 270 of Young's sprinkler heads to a Dover metal recycling operation.

Rodriguez, who also was charged with the theft a few weeks earlier of 110 sprinkler heads from Eddie Mercer's Dover Road farm, is one of four men in recent weeks to be arrested in connection with the rash of stolen sprinklers, authorities said.

Brothers Robert and Kenneth Reeves of Dover and Joel Batano, address unknown, were charged with the theft of sprinklers at other area farms, authorities said.

The arrests and increased vigilance by farmers and law enforcement seem to have had an impact on the thefts, New said.

'Basically, it fell off,' he said. 'The extra surveillance we've been doing by land and air has helped. Some of the farmers use their own people at night. My people have been around at night. Everybody's more aware of it.'

Everyone, including the metal recyclers, have started alerting authorities when people show up with sprinkler heads to sell.

'My Rain Birds were two years old, practically brand new. You could tell there was nothing wrong with them,' said Mercer, who was told that his sprinklers were sold for scrap.

Soaring prices for copper, brass and other metals has spawned widespread theft of construction materials, air conditioners and wiring in railroad signals in addition to the irrigation systems that are being dismantled in the midst of berry season.

'The big problem is, these people have a way to sell them and as long as they have a way to sell them they're going to keep it up,' Grooms said. 'They need to cut off the people buying them from them.'

The berry crop, for the most part, is established and for now, the danger of crop destruction is past.

Soon, though, the sprinklers will be needed to protect the berries from the threat of winter freezes and the growers will have to keep close watch on the sprinkler heads.

'All of us farmers will be cranking up the day before a predicted freeze to make sure we've got Rain Birds on there. If you don't have replacement birds, you'll just have to shut that section off and lose all the blooms and berries,' Grooms said.

'It's just another thing to worry about. God Almighty.'

Reporter Jan Hollingsworth can be reached at (813) 865-4436 or at jhollingsworth@tampatrib.com.

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