A second man has faced court over a cannabis crop at Toolamba that was the biggest hydroponic cannabis crop ever discovered by police in Victoria.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
Police discovered 8805 cannabis plants, ranging from seedlings to mature plants, growing at the Waugh Rd property in 2022.
Quoc Vinh Tran, 35, pleaded guilty in Shepparton County Court to cultivating a large commercial quantity of a narcotic plant.
The court heard the plants weighed a total of 5089kg, while a further 88kg of dried cannabis was also discovered.
The crop was worth an estimated $22 million to $26 million if all the plants reached maturity, the court heard.
The crop was more than 20 times the amount of cannabis that constitutes a large commercial quantity of the drug by weight, and eight times more than what constitutes a large commercial quantity by the number of plants.
The plants were discovered in two greenhouses on the property — one with 3371 plants and another with 2624 — as well as a packing shed that held 2410 cannabis seedlings being grown from cuttings under grow lights.
Prosecutor Andrew Grant described it as a “sophisticated” set-up at the property, with irrigation to each individual plant, while there was also a drying room and an area where seedlings were propagated.
Two greenhouses were used to grow the cannabis plants, while a packing shed was used to propagate seedlings and as a drying room.
There was so much cannabis at the property, that much of it had to be loaded on to trucks to be weighed on a weighbridge.
Judge Pandeep Tiwana described the amount of cannabis uncovered as “enormous”.
“This is just an astonishing amount,” he said.
The court was told Tran and four other men, including Duy Duc Dao, 31, were arrested at the property when police searched it on February 9, 2022.
The three men other men have also been charged, but have failed to appear in court since they were bailed.
Tran had also failed to appear in court on July 7 last year while he was on bail, and was picked up by police in Melbourne two and a half months later and remanded in custody.
The court was told Tran was in Australia from Vietnam on a student visa at the time, and it was likely he would be deported back to Vietnam after serving any sentence.
Mr Grant said the prosecution alleged Tran was living at the Toolamba property at the time of the police raid, and had done so since August 2021.
Photos were found on Tran’s phone of the second greenhouse being built at the property, as well as pictures of cannabis being grown there on three separate occasions in November 2021 and January 2022.
A video on Tran’s phone also showed Dao and others in the packing shed weighing boxes.
Mr Grant said the main differences in Tran and Dao’s cases were that Dao’s name was on both the property lease and electricity account, as well as Tran failing to appear in court last year whereas Dao had been present.
Other than that, he said their roles were the same.
Tran’s defence counsel William Barker said his client had grown up in Vietnam, before moving to Taiwan where he worked for seven years.
The cannabis was burnt by authorities in February 2022 after it had been counted and weighed.
Photo by
Megan Fisher
When he was unable to get a visa to live there permanently, he returned to Vietnam, before immigrating to Australia.
While the law deals with the charge of cultivating a narcotic plant in terms of weight of the cannabis, Mr Barker urged the judge to also look at the role his client was playing in the set-up, saying he was “a lacky” who was there to “do the labour”.
“He was paid to work as a labourer. There was nothing to suggest he would be paid a dividend (of the sale of the crop),” Mr Barker said.
Judge, however, said Tran’s role was “not right at the bottom end of the scale”.
“He was not just sitting in a chair while others tended the crop,” he said.
19°C