Why would someone steal 800 pounds of saw palmetto berries?

RUSKIN, Fla. (WFLA) — The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office is investigating after two people allegedly illegally harvested 800 pounds of saw palmetto berries from a farm in Ruskin.

Apothecary and owner of Herbal Artists in St. Petersburg said there are a few reasons why someone might want that many saw palmetto berries.

They have plenty of health benefits and the plants can bring in a lot of money.

“It helps the kidneys, it helps the prostate. It helps move and get rid of any kind of toxicity in our system,” Michael Freiden said.

Freiden was shocked to hear someone illegally harvested so many berries.

The Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission said it’s been an issue during late summer for years. That’s when it’s saw palmetto harvest season.

Freiden sells the raw saw palmetto plant and powder at his shop. He said the more you do to it, the more money can be made.

He said if the people who illegally harvested 800 pounds of saw palmetto berries transformed them into pills or tinctures, they would have made a huge profit.

“Probably anywhere between half a million and $750,000 depending on how you’re going to bring it to market,” Freiden said.

This summer, it became a third-degree felony in Florida to harvest saw palmetto from public land without a permit or to harvest the plant off private property without the owner’s permission.

It takes a long time for the plant to grow and the FWC said more than 200 species rely on the saw palmetto plant.

People who unlawfully harvest the plant could spend up to five years in prison.

While the local apothecary provided several reasons why the berry thieves might have stolen 800 pounds of berries, a farm worker who said he met the alleged thieves thinks there might be another motive.

Jeremy McGurk, the general manager of Sundance Growers, said a man and a woman stopped by their farm before he found out about what happened at the farm across the street.

“It seemed like she was looking for some random entity or person,” McGurk said.

He said she kept showing him a picture of a Florida vehicle registration for the person she was looking for.

Days later, a farm worker from Deseret Farms allegedly showed up at the Sundance Growers asking if they saw or heard anything about someone who illegally harvested their saw palmetto berries.

The thieves’ motive remains unclear.

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