As the education director for shoplifting education and prevention, I follow the news incidents relating to theft carefully. It seems some odd things are happening in Canada, Quebec to be more specific.

First it was the largest theft of maple syrup in world history and now it is a huge apple theft. Add another ingredient to the list of strange agricultural thefts in Quebec: apple trees. As reported in www.montrealgazette.com.

In this case, we could be looking at a case of ‘pomicide.’ A little more than 140 small apple trees were stolen from an orchard in a renowned apple-growing area in the Montérégie, southeast of Montreal. The trees were stolen and all that remained were the holes in the ground where the root balls had been were discovered by the owner on Saturday.

John Watson, forest-operations manager with the Morgan Arboretum, said apple saplings do have some value because they can be of a grafted or budded variety and grown specifically for production of apples. But, he cautioned, removing the saplings from the ground at this time of year amounts to almost certain death for the trees.

Previous agricultural heists have been much larger in scope and just as bizarre, most notably the $22 million theft of 16,000 barrels of maple syrup, systematically siphoned off from a storage facility sometime between July 2011 and August 2012. The maple sugar theft tickled the funny bone of noted American comic Jon Stewart, who sent a crew from his satirical The Daily Show to Montreal in January to film an episode about the event.

In December 2012, a farmer discovered that 465 tons of feed corn, worth $140,000, had been taken from storage silos on the property. In this case, the power to the alarm was cut and the surveillance cameras disabled.

Apples, corn and syrup — sounds like a nice breakfast treat. Perhaps, if these thieves got help to stop stealing from others, our breakfasts would be a little less expensive.