Many already know about the infamous Emerald Triangle on the Lost Coast. Cannabis farms in this area of Northern California have remained hidden from detection for decades within the dense redwood forest. The tallest trees in the world are the perfect canopy of cover and a natural guard against intruders.

Marijuana growers could thrive in secrecy. But not everyone is fortunate enough to hide among the silent giants. Much has been invested in guarding these secret operations, and we’re not simply talking about armored men on a murder spree. The folks on this list are more creative than that. In an underground economy like the marijuana trade, you have to be an original.

How does one conceal a pot farm worth millions?

Some ideas to protect a grower’s investment are pure genius, while others remain laughably absurd. As cannabis slowly becomes varying degrees of “legal” across the United States and the world, growers are emerging from the shadows. They still have valuable assets to guard, but now they have more freedom and resources.

In the not-too-distant past, growers were not as lucky. Whether it’s a federal prison sentence on the line or just a lot of dough, cannabis operations must be protected at all costs by whatever means necessary.

10 Booby Traps

Just as pirates planted booby traps in caves to ward off thieves from their tantalizing treasures, so have pot farmers used these devices to protect their lucrative investments. These traps range from trip wires that trigger fragmentation grenades to acid-filled buckets suspended in the trees. Growers have even been known to dig pits with hidden nails and sharpened sticks to impale intruders.

In Cleveland, Ohio, County Sheriff Keith Wood was the victim of such a leg trap. His boot was pierced with a long nail positioned beneath a thin wooden slab. Wood said, “We routinely see them. Traps are always something we have to be mindful of. There’s a lot of money involved, and (growers) are trying to protect what’s theirs.”^[1]

Unfortunately, a trap recently backfired on a grower in New York. Daniel Ricketts used several methods to protect his farm, including barbed wire and a leg trap that is often used for coyotes. However, it was an invisible piano wire he had planted that nearly decapitated him as he steered his ATV directly into it full throttle.

9 Secret Bookcase Doors

It’s everyone’s dream to have a bookcase that secretly opens up to a hidden room. Now imagine the room is filled to the brim with blossoming green buds and the pungent smell of marijuana.

It’s no fairy tale. In a man’s garage in Texas, a bookcase rested against the wall hiding a secret door. Police found a specialized key that triggered a magnet behind the door. It opened to a dark stairwell that led them to an underground chamber where they were greeted with $1 million worth of marijuana.

In another case in Essex, England, a man owned a pub called The Joker. Behind the pub’s seemingly innocent bookshelf, there was a small metal door. His secret might never have been revealed if it hadn’t been for a slight hole in the wall that enabled police to see the heat lamps and hydroponic system.^[2]

In another major slipup in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, two newlyweds were arguing in the basement when the wife noticed that a mirror and bookcase had been moved. She entered a door into a room she hadn’t known existed to find her husband’s illegal operation in full swing. He whacked her upside the head with one of his plants, and then she called the police.

8 Robots

In recent years, there has been a movement toward using robot security patrols for outdoor marijuana crops. In California, the growers of Canndescent tested out this idea with the help of the company Sharp Intellos. They implemented automated unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to guard the perimeter in the evenings.

Todd Kleperis, chief executive officer of Hardcar Security, explained that robots are the most effective in this endeavor because humans are naturally flawed. He said, “At night, guards sleep, they play video games, and spend time on social media. It’s fraught with human error.”^[3] Not to mention, the security detail must put their lives on the line every night.

So robots are the natural solution. Kleperis said, “If you’ve ever been shot at, it’s very scary. These robots can take a gunshot better than a human.” Robots do not return the gunfire but merely alert the humans when something is amiss. However, Kleperis mentioned that he is considering adding a pepper spray function in the future.

7 Armed Scarecrow

A sophisticated operation with campsites, water pumps, and 10,000 1.8-meter-high (6 ft) marijuana plants was discovered near Dallas, Texas. The 5-acre site, just outside a rest stop, was so well hidden that it was only discovered via an anonymous tip.

First, police approached the site with a drone. Then they needed a bulldozer to clear a path through the dense woods. When they arrived, the only guard in sight was a sinister scarecrow positioned in a hammock with a tilted hat over its face, boots on, and a fake rifle strapped across its chest.^[4]

The presence of a gun makes it clear that the dummy was a deterrent, not for hungry crows but humans who have strayed too far from the rest stop.

6 Thin Black Screen

Sometimes, growers choose to hide in plain sight. In this case, nothing but a thin black veil whipping in the wind hid the illegal merchandise from an aerial view. Nothing else seemed to be needed as this operation was being conducted in the remote Mexican desert.

Army General Alfonso Duarte said that the black tarp is routinely used by farms to protect crops from the harsh Mexican sun. Due to this blind spot, Duarte explained, it was difficult to verify the type of crops being grown from the air. So soldiers had to travel to the isolated area on foot to be certain.

There, they discovered that the black screen hid a 300-acre plantation that produced approximately 120 tons of pot with an estimated value of $160 million. It was revealed to be one of the largest (if not the largest) marijuana plantations ever discovered in Mexico.^[5]

5 Cornfields

America leads the world in corn production, but many are unaware of the agricultural underworld that persists. If you take a stroll through a cornfield, you’re likely to come across a skunky whiff of a different sort of crop.

Cornfields are planted across hundreds of acres, sometimes thousands. Once the corn is planted, the farmer doesn’t set foot in the field again until harvest time. This is due to labor-saving technology and innovations. It’s very convenient for marijuana growers, who can easily hide their plants among the giant stalks of corn.

Cannabis grows faster than corn. It can be transplanted into a field after corn is planted and then grow to fruition before the corn is harvested. In the Corn Belt, farmers routinely find marijuana patches in their fields. There are entire Internet forums for pot growers to discuss the business of hiding their crops in cornfields.

Not only is there ample sunlight but the corn farmers ensure that the soil is rich and optimal growing conditions are met. Plus, marijuana growers plant a network of small patches throughout the cornfields using GPS technology, which makes it impossible to detect. The large industrial-style farming of corn has given birth to this green underbelly of criminal profit that is almost completely untraceable.^[6]

4 Prison

In California’s Central Valley, there is a small red dot of a town called Coalinga. As you are driving into town, there’s a billboard with bold lettering that reads, “Jesus is Lord of Coalinga.” It’s a highly religious, Republican community that has voted against marijuana legalization every time it has appeared on the ballot.

The town was bankrupt, with $3 million in debt and high unemployment. Its only asset was an abandoned prison. They tried desperately to sell it, but nobody wanted the building until a strange, unexpected buyer came along: Ocean Grown Extracts. An investor in this medical marijuana company was Damian Marley, son of the reggae singer Bob Marley.

“This is symbolic and a big middle finger to the drug war and to a broken system that hasn’t worked for a long time now,” Marley’s manager said.^[7] It’s fantastically ironic that a large marijuana growing operation would take place in a prison which had recently housed convicts for marijuana-related crimes.

3 National Parks

The Forest Service says that its law enforcement officers spend most of their time investigating illegal cannabis operations. California has over 16 million acres of national forest lands, and illegal grows have been found in 40 of its 58 counties. Massive marijuana grows have even been discovered in iconic national parks like Yosemite.

It’s incredibly dangerous when an unsuspecting visitor happens upon one of the aforementioned booby traps that are common. One may be joyfully hiking and twirling in the hills, Sound-of-Music style, only to trip a wire connected to a shotgun shell.

There’s also the use of pesticides, like carbofuran, that are so gross that they have been outlawed in California for more than a decade. Majestic elk and snowy owls consume these lethal poisons and fall dead on the spot. Not to mention the water pollution and trash heaps that the marijuana growers leave behind. Pot farmers are not marijuana-loving hippies that want to save the planet as is often romanticized.^[8]

2 Slaves In A Nuclear Bunker

Three men were jailed for converting a former nuclear bunker into an industrial-sized pot farm in Wiltshire, England. They had been operating this site for at least five years. When it was discovered, there were nearly 5,000 plants safely guarded belowground.

Unfortunately, the police also found three Vietnamese men who had been locked behind a 13-centimeter (5 in) door that was strong enough to withstand a nuclear blast. None of them had a key to the door. The men, two of whom were teenagers, appeared utterly terrified.

Detective Inspector Paul Franklin said, “It was slavery, there’s no doubt. [ . . . ] They were trafficked from Vietnam, they were placed there and told to work.” None of the three men who were jailed faced charges of slavery, however. The victims wouldn’t talk to the cops. It’s likely that there were threats against their families back home.^[9]

The next day, another young Vietnamese man was found wandering aimlessly outside a nearby rural village. Police suspect that he escaped by slicing open his metal ventilation tunnel on the roof.

1 Deadly Predators

In folklore and myth, snakes are often guardians. The snake is the universal protector of sacred trees or, in the case of pot growers, the protector of expensive crops.

In Louisiana, a grower used a python to protect his 2.3 kilograms (5 lb) of weed. On a farm in Essex, England, a marijuana greenhouse had 24 snakes slithering in between the greenery. Two of those snakes were horned vipers, which are highly venomous.

In western Canada, police discovered 10 black bears on a pot plantation with 1,000 cannabis plants. The wild bears had been lured onto the property with dog food to guard the premises. It seems like an army of bears would be a clever intimidation tactic to ward off would-be thieves, but charging beasts with wild eyes and gnashing teeth were far from the reality of these docile creatures.

After the initial shock wore off, police quickly learned that the bears weren’t going to attack. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant said, “They were tame. They just sat around watching. At one point, one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit, and then jumped off.”^[10]

Guard dogs also monitor pot plantations. In fact, they are so common that you can actually buy specially trained dogs for “cannabis protection” online now. Alligators as watchdogs, or “watchgators,” aren’t as common, but they aren’t just a one-time oddity, either. It’s a trend that’s seen from Pennsylvania and Maryland all the way across the country to California.

“Mr. Teeth” was one such gator. At 1.5 meters (5 ft) long, he was found patrolling a grower’s bedroom with 15 kilograms (34 lb) of pot. Another gator was the 25-kilogram (55 lb) Wally, who was discovered in a swimming pool in Hemet, California. Wally was guarding 2,200 plants that would have brought in approximately $1.5 million.

Farming was one of the great steps in the development of human civilisation. The ability to grow the necessities of life freed humans from the need to scavenge and live a nomadic lifestyle. Now for our convenience almost everything is produced by intensive agriculture. Some types of farming are done on a smaller scale however, if the things they produce are more unusual.

Here are ten of the strangest farms in the world, or above it.

10 Horrifying Facts About Baby Farms

10 Snake Farm

The Queen Saovabha Memorial Institute in Bangkok is both a popular tourist site and important farm. The animals they produce are less cuddly than cows but they can still be milked. They farm venomous snakes and extract their venom to produce cures for snake bites and perform research.

The anti-venoms made here are vital to curing people who get bitten by snakes. Using their thousands of venomous snakes and a steady hand the researchers at the snake farm force their reptiles to bite onto jars. As the venom drips from their fangs it is collected and used to make the anti-venom. Those who want to see how this works can pay a small fee to watch a deadly snake being milked.

Other snake farms exist around the world and it turns out snakes are unexpectedly good domestic animals. As long as they are fed and kept warm they are quite happy hanging out in drawers until they are milked.^[1]

9 Spider Goats

A goat may not seem like the most exciting of animals but Freckles, along with her sisters, is not just any goat. She is part spider and part of the synthetic biology revolution. Scientists at Utah State University were interested in the properties of the drag silk spiders use to break their fall. It is stronger than Kevlar and might have uses in surgery.

The problem is that spiders can be tricky to farm. If you put cows close together they feel comfortable. If you put spiders too close together they tend to turn cannibalistic. You don’t want your farm animals to eat each other. So researchers introduced the genes that make spider silk to goats. All they have to do now to gather the silk proteins they are interest in is milk their goats.

Once purified and turned into fibres, known as BioSteel, the silk proteins are up to ten times stronger than steel of the same thickness and can be stretched up to 20 times its length without breaking.^[2]

8 Moose Farm

Moose milk is pretty extraordinary stuff. It has more essential amino acids than cow’s milk. It also has double the amount of fat and is slightly pine scented. The problem is that moose are big, heave, and pretty wild. At the Ivan Susanin Sanatorium in Russia the milk from moose is regularly used to treat a range of illnesses.

The moose that produce the milk are not kept on the farm but range around the local forests until they return to the farm to give birth. It is then that the farmers perform the slightly risky job of milking the moose. To ensure that their moose do not wander off completely they are fitted with radio trackers.

The farm doesn’t actually make much money from its milk, despite its reputed health benefits. Because of the limited amounts of milk that are produced only once per year the farm makes most of its money from the tourists who come to see the moose.^[3]

7 The Pope’s Farm

Castel Gandolfo was bought in the 16th century as a summer residence for the Pope. As well as a holiday home for the head of the Catholic church Castel Gandolfo also features 62 acres of farmland that produced crops exclusively for the use of the Vatican.

Or it did until Pope Francis took over. He has not stayed overnight there and has opened it up to visitors in a way that it never has been before. Tourists can even get there on a train from Vatican City on a train that once only the Pope got to use. The produce of the Pope’s farm can now be bought by anyone who wants some sanctified agricultural products.

The chickens on the farm are particularly holy. They eat the leftover dough from communion wafers that are made by nuns on the site.^[4]

6 Body Farm

When you plant something at a farm you usually do so in hopes that something will spring up for you to harvest. On a body farm however you probably want your crops to stay in the ground. Body farms exist to allow researchers to follow the process of bodies decomposing.

At a body farm human bodies are left outside in various conditions. Researchers then monitor the state of the bodies. By creating a timeline of decomposition it helps police to figure out how long a body has been outside. One of the methods they use is to see which insects and other animals begin to eat the bodies and when.

“If a bone has squirrel gnawing, it’s been there at least a year. So squirrels are a time since death indicator, and squirrels tend to gnaw on the bones in the spring, apparently for the calcium for their new litter, and you can even see annual cycles of squirrel gnawing.”

Most bodies planted on the farms come from those who have donated their cadavers to science. Some people specifically leave their bodies to body farms to help with the research.^[5]

Top 10 Horrific Farming Nightmares

5 Cannabis Farms

Drugs are big business. Because of the medicinal properties of many illicit drugs even governments can be in the drug growing business. Their farms tend to be out in the open, if heavily guarded. But where cannabis is illegal growers have been forced to get creative in where they put their farms.

Sometimes given away when it snows because the roof is so hot it melts off. In Britain one cannabis grower converted a former nuclear bunker into a farm with over 800 plants in it. Using expensive lighting and watering systems he was able to grow his plants underground.

Other cannabis farmers convert their attics into growing rooms. This has the advantage of hiding the light that the farms require to be on all day long. It comes with its own downside in cold climates however. The heat of the farms hidden under the roof is sufficient to melt any snow that may fall on it. All police have to do is look for the one house without a snowy roof and the farm is busted.^[6]

4 Leech Farms

Leeches have been used in medicine for hundreds of years. To feed the need for leeches they had to be gathered from waterways where they lived naturally. Leech collecting used to be one of the worst jobs going because the best way to attract a leech was to simply wade into a pond or river and let them bite you. Once a leech had latched on the collector had to wait until they were fat with blood before picking them off.

Today leeches still have their uses in medicine even if the once popular practice of blood-letting has thankfully died out as a cure-all. Because they feast on blood leeches produce a powerful anticoagulant to keep the blood flowing. Attaching leeches after surgery helps blood reach the site of injuries. Luckily we have figured out ways to farm them.

To breed leeches farmers now use sausage casings filled with sheep blood. The leeches bite this, instead of the farmer, once every six months. Once grown to full size they are packaged and sent out to hospitals for a snack/ new career in medicine.^[7]

3 Pig Toilets

Pigs are not picky eaters. In past centuries it was common to see pigs wandering around in towns and villages snacking on anything that humans had thrown away. In other places however pigs were, and still are, kept in toilets to eat human waste.

In ancient China pigsties were built with a latrine above it. When people went to the toilet they were doing two jobs, not just a number two. In rural China the same symbol was used for both toilet and pigsty because this method of feeding pigs was so common. Once human waste had passed through a pig the manure was much less likely to spread disease. It was an easy and effective way of dealing with sewage.

Unfortunately feeding pigs sewage is a bad idea, especially if you then eat the pig. Parasites that live in both pigs and humans can spread quickly when they each feed off each other. In most places the use of pig toilets in farming has been banned but some societies still use them and prize the meat that is produced.

2 Space Farm

If humans ever want to colonise space then they will have to come up with ways to grow food without the benefit of Earth under them. While plants have been grown on space stations and satellites before the crops were always sent back home – not for lunch but for study by scientists.

It was only in 2015 that astronauts first ate food produced in space. Using a system known as Veggie the astronauts on the International Space Station grew their first crop of Red Romaine Lettuce. By using LEDs as a source of light for the plants the system doesn’t waste energy on producing heat. They can also be tuned to specific wavelengths that can best be used by different crops for maximum efficiency.

Since then cabbages, mustard, kale, and pak choi have all been grown on the ISS. On Earth the Veggie system has been tested on over a hundred different plants so the menu of the first restaurant in space is likely to be fairly expansive.^[8]

1 Bird Nests

Soups are pretty easy meals to make and benefit from the fact you can throw almost any ingredient you happen to have to hand in them. That hasn’t stopped people looking for extra rare foods to add to their soups. Bird nest soup is a delicacy made almost entirely from the spit that swiftlet birds use to create their nests. When the nests are dissolved in a soup they produce a gloopy texture that is particularly sought after.

The problem is that the birds create their nests in hard to reach places. Traditionally those who collected the nests clambered up bamboo poles to cut the nests down. The difficulty and danger of this has made the dried bird nests among the most expensive animal food products in the world.

Collecting swiftlet nests has caused populations of the birds to fall. One way of reducing this impact is to build swiftlet farms. In Indonesia these are often large concrete structures resembling houses with plenty of space inside for the nests to be built on. Instead of destroying the nests before chicks have hatched the farmers wait until the breeding season is over which helps to keep the swiftlet population up.

Still, despite now being a farmable commodity bird nest soup is still expensive. Or expensive for a dish of bird saliva.^[9]

10 Bizarre Ways Growers Guard Pot Farms