Olive growers along Wilderness Road were marvelling yesterday at the brazen theft that saw intruders do what no pickers can achieve – strip all the trees bare.

"It would normally take six pickers three days to do what happened here – and they would still leave a lot of olives behind,'' Quentin von Essen, owner of Wildnerness Estate, told the Mercury.

"Some olive trees are higher than 3m and they were all cleaned up,'' Mr von Essen said.

"On 450 trees on our estate, I counted only five olives left.

"What is more eerie though, is that no olives were on the ground either.

"We can only believe they must have been sucked off the trees with a vacuum method that is used in Italy.

"Total losses on the four properties affected will probably come to about $20,000,'' Mr von Essen said.

"This theft is similar to what happened in the same area about four years ago – and we rang police and got them involved the moment we discovered what had happened."

He said only trees near the road had been hit –- the thieves left trees growing near houses untouched.

There were also reports of a suspicious van seen "hanging around" in Wildnerness Road during the early hours of last week.

Sandra Whaling of Wandalyn Wildnerness Estate said they had lost olives from about 120 trees.

"We believe this operation was conducted on Thursday night, with olives taken from four farms down Wilderness Road,'' Ms Whaling

said.

"The theft was incredibily neatly done – they didn't leave a single olive in our yard.

"We think they may have used a vacuum machine with suction strong enough to have stripped the trees.

"It would be a fairly noisy operation though, and although we did hear traffic noises, we didn't think much about it."

She said growers believed the latest incident would have involved about 20 people – both to operate the vacuum and to take the olives away."