The culprits were not the typical ones — heat waves, fires or drought — but thieves, who have been stripping the copper wires out of irrigation systems throughout California. The rampant thefts have left farmers without functioning water pumps for days and weeks at a time, creating financial loss and occasional crop devastation in a region still smarting from a spectacular freeze last winter.


Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper resulting from a building boom in Asia. Common in developing counties, metal theft is now committed in nearly every state, largely by methamphetamine users who hock the metal to buy drugs, the authorities say.

Thieves have stripped the wires out of phone lines, pulled plaques off cemetery plots, raided air-conditioning systems in schools and yanked catalytic converters from cars, all to be resold to scrap metal recyclers.

But perhaps no group has been as been as consistently singled out as California farmers, who provide roughly half of the nation’s fruits and vegetables. Irrigation systems, a treasure trove of copper, tend to be in remote places, out of the eyes of farmers and, until recently, law enforcement.