A bucolic-looking Frank Cannon BSc (Hons) CSyP, CPP, RISC, FSyI, a Chartered Security Professional (CSyP), and Senior Consultant at Optimal Risk, writes about rural crime.
Jeremy Clarkson tells me that our farmers have so much to worry about to ensure their way of life provides a financial gain; the daily grind is not a ‘job’, it’s a blessing and a curse that seems to originate with a calling. The global events that drive the price at market, the consequence of climate change, and the absence of skilled labour all contribute to the jeopardy of putting food on our plates, but the one thing that our landowners, farmers, and rural businesses should not have to worry about is the unscrupulous behaviour of the ever-growing criminal fraternity. Those people who visit their farms or business premises with an intent to steal, damage, or kill.
It’s not acceptable! The impact of rural crime goes far beyond the cost of replacing the damaged or stolen property or replacing the missing or poisoned pedigree livestock; some of which have taken generations to breed. At Optimal Risk Group (ORG), we have a way of protecting our agriculture and horticulture businesses that we believe can support a generational family farmer or an agricultural cooperative who reap the benefits of collaborative farming.
Our six-stage approach ensures that protective security becomes part of the business model and sits alongside safety hazards, environmental compliance, and business continuity. It’s a risk management process that helps increase the certainty of success; it helps understand and mitigate the worries associated with modern methods of farming. Hmm, six stages – what does that mean? Here goes, a 101 approach to protecting the farm without the bullshit.
Stage 1: what do we need to protect? And your appetite for adversarial risk, i.e., what can you tolerate before it starts to impact your bottom line? Examine your farming processes and identify the critical materials, equipment, or tools you need to optimise the output. Is it the quad bike, the fertiliser, or the award-winning ram —without which your pedigree flock will depreciate in value.
A good place to start is the asset register and where you have spent your money over the last five years. Consider what you use every day, and what provides you the best return on that investment. This might be measured in efficiency, thus giving you more time to focus on other profit-making ventures or simply spending more time with your family or friends. Don’t under estimate the impact of downtime on your mental well-being.
Stage 2: Who are the bad guys? You will intuitively know this, but you might not know when they change the ways in which they conduct their illicit ‘business’. Rural crime and the manner in which it is conducted is extremely well organised; the gang members travel hundreds of miles to assess and conduct their attacks. Not only do you need to know the criminal types, but you also need to know their attack methodologies, what their strengths are, and why they choose to visit your farm.
The bad guys need to be motivated and capable of successfully visiting your farm without getting caught. They need to think that the reward will outweigh the consequence of being caught. They research, plan, and execute their attacks to maximise their gain. Remember, this is their full-time vocation, and they want to repeat their daily activities for as long as they can get away with it.
The bad people come in many shapes and sizes; they are not always professional criminals at the top of their game. A truant teenager seeking solace away from a toxic home or school, a group of mischievous young adults looking for new places to explore, or an ignorant dog walker or dirt biker trespassing through your meadow during lambing season can also cause irrevocable damage that negatively impacts your annual yield. Vandalism, arson and the predatory instinct of a dog around fledgling birds or young lambs can be catastrophic.
Stage 3: are we vulnerable? Now you know what you need to protect, and you have a good idea of who and how unscrupulous people might attack you, it’s time to see if you are vulnerable and if you present as a good target for the bad guys. Put yourself in the attacker’s mindset and see how easy it would be for them to visit your farm and steal or damage your most critical assets.
If you’re in a cooperative and partner with your neighbouring farm, ask them to take a look at your equipment, buildings, or yard to see how they would attack you. You can do the same for them. The keys left under the sun visor to the pickup truck, the stock trailer reversed into the open fronted barn, or the fuel tank tucked away in a hidden area of the yard, all present opportunities to an attacker. Can I use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the sliding latch, is it easy for joy-riders to rally around my yard, or do those holiday makers understand my heifers are calving for the first time?
Seek out weaknesses in your daily routine that might provide an opportunity for bad people to prosper. Be honest. Avoid complacency, and don’t rely on luck to keep you safe. As the IRA stated after the Brighton bomb on the Grand Hotel in 1984 when they failed in their attempt to assassinate Margret Thatcher, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always”.
Stage 4: where do I need to act? You can determine this by assessing the risk of becoming a victim of crime; will they attack my farm, and if they do, what will the impact be. If you understand the motivation of the bad guys and how they attack, then balance this against what you are doing already to protect the things they might be looking to steal. Then you can assess the likelihood of them picking your farm. That’s why it’s important to identify your critical assets, understand the bad guys, and seek out gaps in your defence. It’s a cat and mouse game that needs to be played.
The next step of this ‘game’, is for you to understand the impact of a successful attack. This is the intuitive bit, but you need to calculate the full impact of your time managing the consequences. The replacement cost, the increased insurance premium, the psychological effect on the family, the inability to carryout tasks that that depend on the lost equipment, and the lost time and frustration spent sorting things out.
You can then list these risks in priority order which will help you select where you spend your time trying to reduce the impact. This is where you tap into your risk appetite and understand if you want to gamble and hope it won’t happen to you, or if you need to do something to reduce the likelihood of you becoming a victim of crime. As yourself, will it be a pain in the backside if it occurs? Can I find an alternative way to do the job? Or will it have a significant impact that might cause me to close the farm and have to find a lorry driving job to put food on the table?
Only you can decide what to do and many will choose to do nothing at all – which is a recognised risk management strategy. Some will choose to spend thousands of pounds on installing the latest security cameras believing that to be the right thing to do. And others will tweak their existing farm layout and change a few behaviours to reduce the attractiveness to the bad guys or close the exposed weakness in their defences.
Stage 5: Finding affordable solutions. The cost of change often drives a decision! It’s not just the financial cost that needs to be factored into how you decide what to do, but also the level of effort you are willing to take to safeguard your most critical assets. Most working practices and daily activities are learnt behaviours, passed down from one generation to another and then on to another. Complacency, lethargy, and the belief that it will only happen to others often influence whether change is made or not. Factor in a dollop of ignorance —to the changing attack methodologies or criminal motivations— unwillingness to change (Luddism), or the failure to learn from the story entitled ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, often see farmers procrastinate rather than acting on known vulnerabilities.
It’s a mindset thing. The time it takes me to park up my truck, lock it up, and put the keys in a secure place ready for the next day can be better spent doing… The effort it takes me to get off my tractor to close and lock the gate into the empty paddock… The process for me to mark and register my tools or instruments is… And the reasons why not to do something are endless.
Creating high security places often includes multiple layers of expensive and highly engineered physical infrastructure supported by complex technical security systems each one of which required specialist installers and technicians to calibrate and commission. This is not the solution for a remote farm yard or isolated farm house. It’s disproportionate, very expensive, and still wouldn’t guarantee that the most determined criminal wouldn’t wait until you went to the local country show to pay you a visit.
If you own a shotgun, you take proportionate measures to obtain and retain your licence; if you use controlled substances hazardous to health (COSHH), you lock them away to avoid an accident; and if you use dangerous tools or equipment, it is recommended that you wear personnel protective equipment. It’s the same when you need to protect your property from a criminal or mischievous adolescent. The cheapest way to make a difference is to change your behaviours and do the simple things right every day, i.e., lock the truck, remove the tow hitch from the trailer, close the gate, or reduce the ways in which vehicles can enter your yard or field.
Fly-tipping and hare coursing require access onto your privately owned land. Both types of criminals use cross country or road vehicles when trespassing to commit these crimes; therefore, all you need to do is reduce the opportunity for them to drive onto your land. Ditch and berm around the fields that are attractive for hare coursing or dumping rubbish. Plant a hedgerow on the berm and control the access so you can enter but they cannot. You might be eligible for government grants or find volunteer workers to help plant the environmentally friendly hedgerows. Use a strong gate and robust protected closed-shackle padlock or seek out innovative ways that allow your tractor or quadbike to enter but not a low axled car or 4×4.
Take a similar approach to your yard, assess the likely routes of approach, and make it harder for people to surreptitiously approach without triggering an alarm that alerts you to them being there. Traditionally, your ancestors used a dog as an early warning system, this is why most travelling families have dogs as part of their ‘entourage’. You can of course supplement a dog with an affordable self-installed detection system that relays imagery back to your mobile phone. This does not need to be high-tech equipment typically found at high security sites.
Again, this depends on your willingness to spend time to create protective barriers between your critical assets and those willing to trespass to take them away. Your grandad seldom had to worry about nomadic organised crime gangs travelling 350 miles to steal his Trimble satellite equipment from off the top of his £600,000 Class 8700 Harvester. Nor did he need to worry himself about protecting the 10,000 litres of diesel sat in the yard – at a cost of £1.50 per litre. Modern farmers need to consider modern protective security techniques to combat today’s rural criminals; including methods to minimise the true cost of rustling sheep which is often seen as an amusing or old fashioned crime.
Stage 6: have I got it right? The absence of an attempted or successful attack doesn’t mean you have got it right; it probably means you’ve been lucky, and the bad guys haven’t paid you a visit yet. Research tells us that those previously attacked who choose to do nothing often become repeat victims. A wise land owner or farmer would continue to assess their defences throughout the year. It’s worth regularly repeating stages two, three, and four mentioned above.
Other industrial sectors often contract specially qualified security professionals to test their defences by attempting to surreptitiously enter their sites to plant evidence demonstrating their presence. These ‘penetration testers’ adopt a criminal mindset and use all legal means to access the protected site; recognising however, that the real criminals are prepared to act illegally. Maybe this is an exercise for those within the farm cooperative, neighbouring farms, or the local Young Farmers to consider.
The obvious time to assess the efficacy of your defence is when you hear of an attack in the area, maybe when you change your business model by diversifying into a new revenue stream, or when you purchase a new item of expensive or attractive piece of machinery. The very worst time to check your defence, is just after you become a victim. If you’re watching the horse gallop down the road, it’s probably not worth closing the gate that was designed to corral in your paddock.
I’m sure you are thinking that the content of this article is based on common sense, and you knew it all anyway. You are probably right, and I agree that most of what I have written is simple, logical, and intuitive; therefore, why did a 2023 rural crime report published by NFU Mutual show a 22 per cent increase in the cost of theft in 2022, that amounted to a conservative estimate of £50m loss?
In his introduction to that report, Jim McLaren, the NFU chairman, said: “This year’s rural crime figures make depressing reading but sadly will not come as a surprise to most farmers. Theft continues to blight our agricultural industry and many farmers have experienced the loss of farm machinery, vehicles, fuel or GPS units.”
He went on to say: “Farmers are helping themselves in a number of ways too. For instance, I’m delighted that the pioneering Cumbria YFC’s security training scheme is now being rolled out nationally with our support so that young farmers can help their peers identify the risks and solutions when it comes to protecting their property.”
About Optimal Risk
As an Associate Member of the National Rural Crime Network (NRCN), Optimal Risk champion impactful ways to reduce rural crime; we advocate the guidance provided by the National Rural Crime Unit (NRCU) and we offer meaningful advice to augment the guidance provided by the rural community insurance organisations. The Optimal Risk Group is a trusted partner to UK landowners and farmers and a private security service provider with a vision to reduce the risks associated with rural crime. Visit www.optimalrisk.com.
About the author
As a farmer’s son who spent his childhood in the Lincolnshire Fens, Frank Cannon is now a Chartered Security Professional with over 40 years of military and commercial security experience. An academically qualified independent security consultant, he leads the Optimal Risk agricultural and construction industry adversarial risk management programmes. He is an advocate for behavioural-based security that helps others to embed secure behaviours into their everyday activities. Frank is a Fellow of the Security Institute (SyI) and active participant in the National Infrastructure Crime Reduction Partnership, and the Combined Industries Theft Solution bodies. He co-chairs the Institute’s Built Environment Security Special Interest Group.
