Officials at the California Farm Bureau say with diesel over three dollars a gallon they've been hearing about of a lot of cases of theft from farms recently.
Bureau spokesman Ron Miller cites some examples.

"There have been a number of cases within the last week where people have just had pickup trucks out in the country and have come back and found that their tanks had been siphoned dry."

Officials say at this point no one has a statewide count specifically on diesel thefts and victims often don't file a formal report of an incident involving a small amount.

However in Stanislaus County Sheriff's Detective Giles New says he hasn't heard of any cases  this month. He attributes that to an effort to warn farmers once the price of diesel started to increase.

"We've educated farmers and ranchers around our area to where they're doing a little better job of keeping things locked up."
 
New says eight weeks ago deputies caught two suspects in the act of using a gasoline-powered siphon tube to try to steal hundreds of gallons of fuel.