A FARMER’S son from Hatherleigh has been jailed for building a massive underground cannabis farm which he buried beneath the concrete floor of a barn, writes Ted Davenport.

Daniel Palmer, aged 40, of Hooper Close, Hatherleigh, worked with a professional cannabis grower to produce industrial amounts of the drug in five interlinked shipping containers hidden on his father’s land near Okehampton.

Police recovered more than a kilogram of freshly harvested skunk in empty water butts and the system was capable of producing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of drugs every year.

Palmer ran a business making log cabins on the farm at Easter Hall Park, Petrockstowe but branched out into the far more lucrative drugs enterprise. He chose an isolated spot which was surrounded by woodland before excavating a massive hole in which the five containers were buried.

They were all equipped with high-tech hydroponic cultivation rooms with water supplies and lights to speed up growth and fans to remove the foul air. The whole set up was powered by its own generator.

Palmer concealed the drugs factory by building a large barn over the top of the containers, complete with concrete floor. It meant the only way in was through a hatch in the floor which was covered up by sacks of fertiliser, meaning that the only clue to what was underneath was a duct taking the cable from the generator to the containers.

Easter Hall Park is a 200-acre estate which offers a range of rural activities, including holiday cottages, riding stables, carriage driving, and woodland walks.

Palmer denied producing cannabis but was found guilty by a jury at Exeter Crown Court last month.

He was jailed for six years and three months by Judge Paul Cook, sitting at Taunton, who also set a timetable for the seizure of Palmer’s assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act.

He told him that he had played a very significant role in a sophisticated and well organised operation that was run on a commercial scale.

During the trial Palmer denied knowing anything about the underground containers and said a man called Richard Jones had rented the land from his father.

He believed him to be running a small countryside business but after police found the containers in February 2017, he discovered that Mr Jones had used a false identity.

Palmer was found guilty because his DNA was found inside the underground growing area, including a light fitting. He claimed he must have touched the items before they were taken into the containers.

Police are still trying to trace the main grower who rented the land using a fake passport and driving licence.

Mr Lee Bremridge, prosecuting, said police raided the barn at 7pm on February 10, 2017, and found the generator in a green painted barn which was next to a field full of horses.

They found a manhole leading to five interlinked shipping containers which contained lights, fans, growing beds, watering systems and two large water butts full of freshly cropped cannabis.

Mr Bremridge said: “It goes without saying that the excavation work to dig out and remove enough soil to sink five shipping containers and build a barn on top of them must have been huge.

“This was a large a sophisticated cannabis growing factory with a generator providing power. This was growing on an industrial scale. The value of what it could have produced would be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.”