Protecting Your Farm

Protecting Your Farm. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

There is something about living out in the country. There is an overall feeling of quiet and solitude you just can’t get living in town. But along with that solitude is the necessity to protect yourself and your investment. Thieves like the fact that you are isolated and take advantage it. So how do you maintain a sense of security down on the farm?

NUNEZ: Well I think they rely a lot on their neighbors out there. They pretty much know who their neighbors are for like the next 10 miles. That’s probably the big one. When you get farther out from the city a lot of them have the mentality where they like to take care of their own problems.

Detective Jason Nunez is with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department in Washington State where towns are few and far between. Knowing who is usually in your area is a good start. A few years back he says they saw quite a lot of anhydrous ammonia thefts from tank parked close to easily accessible roads for use in creating methamphetamines but new laws have curbed that.

NUNEZ: However fuel theft has really come up in the last couple of years especially with prices that spiked recently so fuel tanks is a big one for people to lock up their fuel tanks. Hide them away from the roadway. It’s common for these fuel thieves to carry large fuel tanks in the back of their pickups and drive around to the farmers and the businesses and ask to see if they can sell their fuel to them for half price, fuel that’s stolen from one of their neighboring farms.

Nunez says that irrigators need to take extra precaution.

NUNEZ: Metal theft has really come up in the last couple of years and a lot of the metal theft is happening out on the farms where people are seeing metal from the roadway. Aluminum pipes has always been a big one for the hand lines where farmers will often stack aluminum hand lines near the roadway so that they can kind of keep track of it easier and be able to pick it up easier.

Thieves have become fairly sophisticated over the years and have even resorted to bold measures.

NUNEZ: In the last couple of years I have also seen an increase where thieves are driving around with pickups with torches on the backs and driving on a farmer’s property and cutting up metal. Old vehicles or old metal trailers, anything. Cutting it up and driving it over to the recyclers and selling the metal. There’s been a big increase in that in the last couple of years.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.