A bust of an outdoor, commercial marijuana grow scene on Pacific Lumber Co. property Monday netted more than 10,000 plants, making the seizure the largest this year by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.

The 10,068 sprouting plants ranged in height from 3 inches to 6 inches and were found in the Larabee Valley area, which is east of Bridgeville, a Sheriff’s Office news release said. The grow site was surrounded by an electric deer fence and had an automated watering system, the release said.

No suspects were found at the site, but supplies were left in a staging area and the case is under investigation.

The bust of the new plants came at the start of the outdoor marijuana grow season, Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Brenda Godsey said. About half of the plants were male, while the other half were female, Godsey said, so once harvested, the females would have yielded roughly 5,000 pounds of bud. At $3,500 to $5,000 a pound, the harvested marijuana would have netted between $17.5 million and $25 million, depending on the quality.

The grow was found about a half-mile from the site where Eloy Infante-Toscano was killed after reportedly pointing a loaded shotgun at a sheriff’s deputy in October 2007. Slightly more than 460 pounds of drying pot, worth about $100,000, was found on the Pacific Lumber Co. property. Infante-Toscano, a native of Mexico, was reportedly protecting the pot and was shot twice in the chest and once in an arm by a sheriff’s deputy. He died at the scene.

Should a member of the public happen upon a grow site, the Sheriff’s Office stated, they should immediately leave the area and notify law enforcement. “There are foreign drug-trafficking organizations operating in and around Humboldt County,” Sheriff Gary Philp said in a news release. “These marijuana grows can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to those organizations and they can be motivated to protect their investment.”

Monday’s seizure is small pickings compared to an August 2007 bust of the largest marijuana garden site found by law enforcement in the history of Humboldt County.

Sheriff’s deputies found and eradicated 134,082 marijuana plants that ranged in size from 1 foot to 3 feet in height and would have had a street value of about $469 million at harvest time.

The grow sites were located on Green Diamond Timber Co. property and U.S. Forest Service property. The pot gardens were found in the Bear Creek drainage off U.S. Forest Service Route 1, which is about 34 miles south of Berry Summit off state Route 299.

Godsey said indoor and outdoor pot eradication efforts are year-round and expects bigger busts as the year progresses.

A Sheriff’s Office investigation led to Monday’s bust, Godsey said.

The marijuana plants were chopped down and a small amount is being kept for evidence, Godsey said. The remainder will be buried in an undisclosed location, where it will eventually decompose, she said.