MAYNARDVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) -- A two-day operation, and a multi-agency partnership found more than 1,700 marijuana plants growing in Union County.

But, in the mountains of East Tennessee, you have to get a bird's eye view to find marijuana growing operations.

The Governor's Task Force on Marijuana Eradication took to the skies in a helicopter, while law enforcement stood ready on the ground.

Union Co. Sheriff's Detective Steve Rouse said, "We go out with trucks and four wheelers and so forth, and go get it."

Detective Rouse spent Wednesday and Thursday finding the 1,770 pot plants across Union County, ranging from 6 to 15 feet tall.

He said, "A lot of times they go to open property, open fields, or maybe state or federal government properties, they'll grow it there," so arrests are rare.

"They've got a real good sense of growing it in a way that doesn't track back to them," he said.

On the street, each plant could go for $500 to $1,000, making this bust worth at least $885,000.

So, the growers put a lot of effort into protecting their crop.

"We look for cameras, sometimes the marijuana growers like to put cameras in there, and we look for booby traps," which he described some as, "Fish hooks hanging maybe eye level or just a little bit below, we look for things like that."

And while the Union County find is big, it's actually only 1-percent of all the marijuana the task force found so far this year, at 175,000 plants.