Perhaps they should rename it the Los Pot-res National Forest.

Last week, Monterey County sheriff deputies engineered another marijuana farm bust, bringing their 2006 total close to a whopping 40,000 plants thus far.

On Sept. 27, deputies assigned to the County of Monterey Marijuana Eradication Team (COMMET) located and destroyed a pot garden two miles east of Chews Ridge in the Los Padres National Forest. Working with sheriff’s narcotics detectives and law enforcement officers from the US Forest Service, the deputies seized a total of 4,548 marijuana plants and one-half pound of processed marijuana, all of which has a potential street value of more than $22.7 million.

This most recent sting follows closely on the heels of a 3,440 plant bust in the national forest on Sept. 25, which also yielded several pounds of processed marijuana. But the highlight of this year’s bumper crop of busts came on Sept. 22 when sheriff’s deputies, along with state and federal law enforcement agents, discovered 17,000 plants with an estimated street value of more than $85 million in the national forest’s Arroyo Seco area near Greenfield.

“Last year we found a total of about 25,000 [plants],” says Sgt. Douglas Dahmen, who heads COMMET. “This year, we’ve discovered a couple of really large gardens. [The Sept. 22] bust alone doubled our take on the year.”

Dahmen says COMMET’s ability to eradicate the domestic cultivation of marijuana in the Los Padres National Forest is hampered by limited access to aircraft.

“If we had [a spotter plane] five days a week our guys would be in the air looking for dope and we’d find a whole lot more,” he says.

COMMET only has periodic access to a variety of fixed wing aircraft owned by the Civil Air Patrol, which is made up of public volunteers, and the Sheriff’s Aerosquadron, which is composed of department volunteers. In addition, they occasionally get helicopter support from the military and the state-funded Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP), which assisted on the huge Sept. 22 bust. But CAMP’s availability is limited because of the demand for its services from law enforcement agencies across the state.

“With the helicopters we can short haul the deputies to the site instead of hiking,” Dahmen says. “Then, once the weed is cut up, we throw it into nets and the helicopters slingload it out.

“If we’d tried to pack those 17,000 plants three miles down the mountain, we’d still be there.”

After the plants are removed, they are buried, not burned.

“We used to store it, dry it, burn it,” Dahmen says. “But that was too much weed to bring back to the department. The whole process was time consuming and potentially very expensive. Now we just once take it from garden, transport it and bury it elsewhere. It’s still natural vegetation after all.”

The larger gardens are believed to be controlled by Mexican drug trafficking organizations. These groups import Mexican nationals into the national forest to plant and operate the gardens.

But the smaller gardens, Dahmen says, could be created and maintained by “anyone who lives or travels to Monterey County.

“They bring in a crew to chop trail to get to where they need to be,” he says.

The result is significant damage to the national forest.

“They tear up the hillsides, terrace it, erode it,” Dahmen says. “They use illegal pesticides. They kill wildlife. They divert water. They camp in the garden for three to five months and leave behind a ton of human feces and garbage. It creates a lot of nightmares for everybody. Anyone stumbling into the proximity of garden are threatened—they brandish weapons at them.”

John Bradford of the Los Padres National Forest Service agrees that the pot farms—especially the large scale operations—have a detrimental effect on the national forest.

“The biggest thing is a lot of site degradation,” he says. “They rig complex irrigation systems with plastic pipe and use a tremendous amount of fertilizer. As a result there are a lot of water quality issues.”

COMMET is comprised of two sheriff’s deputies and a deputy district attorney. It is funded by a federal grant administered by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Initially, the grant was supposed to pay for the deputies’ salary, equipment and training, but Dahmen says it has since been cut by 60 percent.

“So the Sheriff and DA have to augment that,” he says. “We also get additional money from the Los Padres National Forest Service, and the DEA chips in for domestic cannabis eradication.”

Still, Dahmen says the program is woefully underfunded and estimates his team only finds about 10 percent of the weed grown in the national forest. He suspects that the cultivation of marijuana may represent a billion-dollar-per-year illegal industry in Monterey County. In addition, he says arrests are rarely made.

“Periodically we’ll make arrests,” he says, “but generally speaking, when we come in with the helicopters, people run out of the gardens.”