In Rural England, Farming Equipment Has Become a Target for Organized Crime

Europe|The Landscape Is Centuries Old. The Crime Is More Modern.

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.”