With horned Highland cattle, neat stone walls and a tiny church that dates from the 15th century on its land, Cowage Farm in Foxley, in southwestern England, hardly looks like a crime scene.
But as Tom Collins completed paperwork in his farmhouse one morning, an employee interrupted to ask what he’d done with a computer screen in one of his tractors.
“I said, ‘What do you mean? It’s in the cab,’” he replied. It turned out that the equipment, along with two GPS systems, had been stolen from two farm vehicles overnight. Standing in the yard where the theft took place, Mr. Collins said the most unnerving thing was that criminals must have watched him to know where his tractors would be.
“It gives you the creeps,” he said.
That sense of unease seems to be growing among British farmers. They are also under pressure from an overhaul of the subsidies available to them after Brexit, and from inflation and tax changes that have prompted tractor protests outside Parliament.
Farms can be lucrative targets for thieves, because of the value of their vehicles and equipment. Thefts are “ever more sophisticated with examples of criminal gangs using technology such as drones” to pinpoint expensive machinery or accessories, according to Jim McLaren, chairman of NFU Mutual, an insurance company specializing in rural areas.
Some equipment, the police say, is stolen to order and moved abroad. “There are organized crime gangs that will operate in a similar way to D.H.L.,” said Philip Wilkinson, the elected police and crime commissioner for Wiltshire, referring to the international shipping and logistics company. They “specialize in shipping equipment from A to B.”
Andy Lemon, who works on rural crime at Wiltshire Police, says that in some instances, high-value equipment has left Britain within 48 hours and ended up in Eastern Europe. But with items like all-terrain vehicles, known locally as quad bikes, thieves often deposit their haul in remote areas for several days as a precaution against tracking devices. If the police or the owner do not reclaim them, the thieves feel safe to move them.
The thieves who targeted Mr. Collins appear to have been efficient. On that same night 18 months ago, he said, five farms nearby had similar equipment stolen.
The cost of rural crime increased by 4.3 percent year-on-year in 2023, to 52.8 million pounds, about $57 million, according to a report by NFU Mutual. That’s a notable sum in a country with fewer than 200,000 farmers. Criminal gangs, the insurer said, are “looking to cash in on continuing high inflation and ready resale markets domestically and overseas.”
The rise echoes a more general trend in England and Wales, where robberies were up 4 percent and shoplifting up almost a quarter in the 12 months to September last year, though household burglaries fell.
Not all farm crime is particularly sophisticated. Mr. Collins, 40, whose family has farmed in this beautiful corner of England for 120 years, lost chain saws and an industrial vacuum cleaner in more casual thefts from his farm’s workshop, and five years ago someone took the 291-year-old bell from the church.
“Who steals a bell from a church?” he asked.
But the sense of an intensifying problem is real. The National Farmers’ Union described rural communities as “under siege from rising crime” in a recent statement, and the government has promised hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund a National Rural Crime Unit.
The police in Wiltshire are stepping up efforts. In an operation with four nearby forces, they recently stopped and checked over 100 vehicles, seizing two, along with a trailer they suspect was stolen.
At the wheel of an unmarked S.U.V. on a recent patrol, Rob Goacher, a rural crime sergeant in Wiltshire, described the lightning speed of some thefts.
In one unsolved case, a Land Rover S.U.V. was stolen in Reading, a large town, fitted with false license plates and driven into a farmer’s yard 50 miles away.
Two men, wearing balaclavas to foil a CCTV camera, hitched up the farmer’s trailer. Then two more “jumped out, wheeled a quad bike round, put the quad bike on the back of the trailer, jumped back into the Land Rover and sped off,” said Sergeant Goacher.
The farmyard raid took 58 seconds.
Driving through villages, past church halls and country pubs, there were few suspicious vehicles to check until Sergeant Goacher spotted a pickup pulling a straw-covered trailer and stopped it.
After a check, he let the vehicle depart — but not before its driver, Tom Geary, recounted how the gates on his farm were recently broken, locks were forced and criminals took gasoline and tools worth £3,500.
“Then they came back a week later and stole some copper cylinders,” said Mr. Geary, 30. On that occasion he tried to confront one of the thieves. But when a second man emerged from behind a shed, he retreated.
“It was pretty brazen,” he said. Both men wore balaclavas and neither seemed perturbed, he added, at being discovered raiding a farm in daylight. “They didn’t say a word.”
Stephen Castle is a London correspondent of The Times, writing widely about Britain, its politics and the country’s relationship with Europe.
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