At a plant nursery near Lake Pleasant last June, farming supplies started to go missing. One day it would be a watering hose. The next day it was a shade cloth and then tree stakes.
For the employees of Arizona Wholesale Growers, it wasn’t immediately obvious what had been happening. That was until they went to use a tractor only to find that its wheels had been removed.
The company’s 80-acre farm isn’t open to the public and is located down a 1.3-mile stretch of Maddock Road, just off New River Road. It’s a private street, dotted with signs that warn against trespassing.
The remote area of the north Valley is considered Arizona State Trust Land, overlapping both the city of Phoenix and the city of Peoria. Much of the land west of New River Road is in Peoria’s jurisdiction, while the area east of the road falls under Phoenix city limits.
Near the farm there, a man camping had been gradually building a shelter for himself out of the nursery’s supplies.
“He took the wheels off it and dragged them to the desert and used them as weights,” Shawn Cox, Wholesale Growers’ general manager, said, adding, “The only way we knew (it was our stuff) was because our name was on the wheels.”