Urban farm thief caught on camera in Fort Wayne, Ind.
The urban farm managers say they don’t want to catch the man or even know who he is. They just want him to stop pulling up the plants so that the community can benefit from the farm’s bounty.
By Corinne Rose
NBC
July 21, 2020
Excerpt:
She says collard greens are one of the farm’s biggest sellers — so much so that customers are limited to buying one pound each because they sell out every week.
She had to install a security camera which captured the man jumping the fence and yanking the plants right out of the ground, which creates an even bigger problem than if he’d simply picked the leaves.
Theisen estimates if the plants had been left in the ground, they would have produced at least 100 pounds of greens this season.
“So now we’re going to have even less and it means we’re going to have less for a while because we have to now start the plants from seed and grow them again. And starting them now we’ll get harvest maybe by September, end of September,” she says.
Since collard greens don’t transplant well, she doubts they’ve been replanted somewhere else.
