California counties fight agricultural crime

Key Takeaways

Most farmers put a lot of effort into maintaining their fences. At the same time, law enforcement agencies in California’s Central Valley are worried about other fences — the intermediaries who help thieves traffic in stolen goods. 

For years, copper wire has been both a staple of farm equipment and a target for criminals, particularly in the nation’s most productive agricultural region. Lt. Randy Gunderman of the Tulare County Sheriff’s Office said the market for stolen copper, much of which reaches dealers covered in remnants of burned plastic — indicating that it had been part of a machine — doesn’t seem to be waning. 

“It’s going to continue to be a problem because recyclers are offering pretty decent money for this stuff,” he said. “As long as they continue to take it, there’s going to be a market for people to steal it and turn it in.”

Even when authorities catch copper thieves, Merced County District Attorney Nicole Silveira said prosecutors are hamstrung by the state’s high threshold for theft. When prosecuting a theft that involved burning a GPS device off a tractor, it made more sense to charge him with arson.

“We really have to look at these cases carefully and make sure that we’re charging everything,” she said. “That’s what we did with that guy, because convicting him with theft would have been a slap on the wrist. Arson, in addition to everything else, is a serious felony.”

That’s to say nothing of the victim. The process of stealing the wire often causes significantly more costly damage. 

“They’ll cut, hook a truck to it, they pull their variable pump speed controller board off the wall, which costs $15,000 to fix,” said Jay Struble, the supervising investigator Merced County’s rural crime prevention unit. “They rip the conduit out of the ground. A lot of times it’s not necessarily the wire that’s the expensive part, it’s all the damage it’s incurred as a result of them taking the wire.”

And it’s not just farms that grow food that have suffered. A theft of $100,000 worth of copper wiring from a Fresno County solar farm in late 2023 caused $2.8 million in damages.

More than California wire country

There’s more to agricultural crime than preventing, investigating and prosecuting copper wire theft. How much more?

“Name it,” Gunderman said. “It could be anything. Vandalism, tool and equipment theft, embezzlement from agribusiness. Trucks and side-by-sides. Someone will steal boxes of bees. Livestock theft.”

That’s right. Gunderman has investigated cattle rustlers — in 2017, he conducted a six-month investigation into a man accused of stealing nearly a thousand head of cattle, totaling a loss of $1.5 million.

Gunderman sees diesel fuel theft, bee theft and of course, copper wire theft being chief among farmers’ concerns this year. 

For the half dozen counties in California that support agricultural crime units in the sheriff’s or prosecutors’ offices, it’s an investment in safeguarding their business community. Tulare and Fresno counties regularly spar for the top agriculture production ranking in the country.

“We have to take these crimes very seriously because when you steal a farmer’s equipment, some people think that a rich farmer can replace it, but that’s not the case,” Silveira said. “You can’t just go to Merced Honda and buy a new tractor. It’s not that easy. So that’s less work the farmer can do. Then he’s not going to be able to make payroll, because he has to replace that piece of equipment. And then that means people aren’t going to be able to put food on the table. 

“It really has a trickle-down effect in our community.”

An eight-county investigation into what they dubbed “Operation Tractor Pull” in 2024 alleged that 11 suspects stole more than two dozen tractors, backhoes and excavators, totaling $2.25 million, and took them to Mexico. Only $1.3 million of the equipment was recovered.

As Silveira noted, however, because the actions did not constitute a violent crime, it was unlikely the suspects would face jail time.

“We can’t put them in jail for an extended amount of time, which sends no message of accountability,” Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said at a press conference.

Talk like a farmer

These agencies target recruits who have agricultural backgrounds. 

“One of my detectives is a fourth-generation dairyman, and another is a third-generation citrus farmer,” Gunderman said. “When we go out and talk to these farmers and ranchers, we need to have an idea of how their operation works to be able to help them.” 

With the potential losses in productivity and equipment in mind, the ag crime units offer ounces of prevention all over their communities. They meet with farm bureaus, social clubs and farming communities, offering advice on preventing theft and vandalism. 

“I think that they like that we’re available,” Silveira said. “They know they can call us and they can work with someone who understands the issue, that we’re there for them and that we communicate with them.”

While she notes that some particularly effective investigative methods are better kept clandestine, Merced County shared a few tactics it encouraged among farmers, beyond vigilance and video cameras:

Offering owner-applied numbers. While they are like vehicle identification numbers (VINs), they are consistent among all of a farmer’s property.

“We don’t have to interpret VINs or deal with criminals filing them off,” Struble said. “You can stamp it in several places on each item.”

Through December 2025, 253 different owner-applied numbers were registered with Merced County.

Encouraging networking among agencies. Particularly through classes, where deputies and investigators can meet peers while learning.

“These criminals aren’t operating alone, so it puts us at a disadvantage if we don’t network with law enforcement across the country,” Struble said. “They can be stealing stuff from my county and going to Stanislaus County, or they could be going to North Carolina.

“That’s how networked they are, we have to get that networked as well.”

Wear the sticker. Merced County distributes reflective stickers to apply to machinery that uses aluminum wire, rather than copper. Struble hopes it acts as a deterrent.

“It’s more vulnerable to moisture, but it’s not valuable, so you don’t have people destroying machinery to pull it out,” he said. “Even if they open it up to get at the wire and cut it, that’s easier to repair than some of the things they do when they take the copper out.”

Tulare was the first county to establish an agricultural crimes unit in 1997, but Gunderman said the unit really hit its stride in the mid-2010s.

“That team was really making a lot of good cases, but they were also doing a lot of presentations, getting in front of growers and encouraging them to be more proactive about security,” he said.

Among the huge plots of agricultural land in the valley, some parts of a farmer’s property could go for days before someone visits and notices something is awry. 

“You can go in and clean up a couple hundred bins out of some of these larger orchards and the farmer may not even know it,” he said.