On Thursday, the Mexican Defense Department reported that soldiers have found the largest weed plantation ever detected in Mexico. The huge field covers an astonishing 300 odd acres (120 hectares), and would have been worth about $160 million if it had been harvested and brought to market.

This is one large crop of weed, an estimated 120 tonnes of it, and it’s about four times larger than the previous record discovery by authorities at a ranch in the northern Chihuahua state in 1984.

Situated about 250 kilometers south of Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, and in the Baja California desert, the plants spent their days covered by black screen-clothes.

On Tuesday, soldiers on the ground reached the isolated area that the plants were growing in and found thousands of plants taller than two meters; the average coming in at just over a meter tall.

Farmers often used these screen-clothes to cover all kinds of crops and this made it difficult for authorities to detect the plants from the air, explained army General Alfonso Duarte.

This video shows a sophisticated system of piped-in irrigation to support the plants, which Duarte said was fed by two wells:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDCFiAcuJmU

Duarte reckoned that there were about 60 people working on the plantation, but they fled when officials descended on the area.

He continued that some were nabbed in a nearby roadblock, but that none were arrested at the scene.

The full extent of the Mexican drug cartels’ income from marijuana is unknown, but authorities fear it could be larger than previously imagined, with several large busts recently, including a 148 ton haul in October last year.

As usual, troops will destroy the fields by burning them soon.

[Source: Yahoo]