Suburbia Becoming a Pot Farm?

Around the country, investigators are increasingly seeing suburban homes in middle-class and well-to-do neighborhoods turned into indoor marijuana farms. Typically investigators find an empty home, save a mattress, a couple of chairs, some snacks in the fridge and an elaborate setup of soil-free growing trays.

Grow houses have been a problem for years in California and Canada, but investigators are now seeing scores of them in the South and New England. In the past six weeks alone, more than 70 have been uncovered in northern Georgia -- nearly 10 times last year’s total for the entire state. Only one was busted in 2005.

Indoor pot farms also have been discovered in recent months in residential areas of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina and Florida.

Crackdowns in Canada and elsewhere have apparently led some operators to move into parts of the United States where the public and police are not as familiar with the operations and less likely to detect them, authorities say.

The DEA said more than 400,000 plants with a potential annual value of $6.4 billion were seized from grow houses in the U.S. last year -- up from about 270,000 the year before. That is less than 10 percent of the marijuana plant seizures in the U.S.; most pot is grown outdoors on farms and in ditches, backyards and gardens.

Grow houses typically grow marijuana hydroponically -- that is, using a nutrient solution instead of soil. They also use 24-hour-a-day lighting to produce plants more rapidly. The marijuana is usually cut, dried and packaged on the premises.

Typically, the windows are covered up, and the electrical system is rigged to hide how much juice is being used.