FACTS
- Crime on farms can have devastating effects on farmers and their families —financial, psychological and social. Crime can also have national implications, too, if it disrupts or damages farm production.
- Crime in the agricultural sector is significant, totaling an estimated five billion in annual losses. Agricultural crimes include theft of livestock, crops, equipment, chemicals, and pesticides, as well as vandalism and other forms of property crime.
- Costs of crime are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices or are absorbed by farmers in the form of lower profits.
- Despite the magnitude of crime in this sector, agricultural crime has received very little attention from criminologists and criminal justice policymakers.
STATS
- Four in five farmers (80.8%) reported having been a victim of some type of farm crime.
- Repeat victimization is high. three in four farmers (76.8%) reported being a victim of crime on two or more occasions, and almost a quarter (23.3%) experienced crime a staggering seven times or more.
- The most common type of crime reported by our survey respondents was trespassing on their property (49.9%). Illegal shooting and hunting (40.7%), theft of livestock (39.4%), and break and enter of farm properties (32.4%) were also high on the list.
- Farms and fields in agricultural areas have been targeted with the theft of portable fuel tanks and farm grade diesel fuel, from 100 to 600 gallons each time.
- Despite these significant levels of victimization, farmers are often reluctant to report farm crime to police. Only two-thirds (66.7%) of victims reported stock theft to police, for example. And trespassing and illegal shooting and hunting were reported by farmers less than half the time.
- Other reasons for non-reporting include a belief that a crime is not serious enough to report or concerns about revenge in a small community (nearly 40%).