Farmers' theft fears mount

Charlie Pedersen

Mounting concern about the threat of burglary on isolated farms has been highlighted by the popularity of hidden miniature cameras and movement detection sensors at this month's Fieldays agricultural show.

Security is becoming a much bigger issue, according to Evan Williams, founder of New Plymouth-based security specialist Target Technology, which has been trading at Fieldays for eight years.

"I guess when something happens to somebody, they become highly motivated. I can talk until I'm blue in the face to you but it's not until you have a break-in that it comes up your list of priorities," Williams said.

"There's not many that can't relate to it now in one form or another."

Target sells a wireless motion alert system that can detect trespassers and send a signal several kilometres back to the farmhouse.

"If you've got a wool-shed over the back of your property and it's two kilometres away, not many people have any experience of how to deal with that and that's where we come into play."

Williams said the big distances between farm buildings made it easier for thieves to go unnoticed.

"We've had people ring up [saying they have] gone to milk in the morning and all their pipe work out of the shed has gone."

Charlie Pedersen, Federated Farmers vice-president, said the "tyranny of distance" meant farmers expected to be self-reliant regarding security.

"The centralisation of the [111] system has failed rural communities in particular because the operators don't seem to have intimate enough knowledge of where our rural locations are and where the response should come from."

But Northland police spokesman Viv Rickard said that problem had been addressed by rural address property identification numbers.

He urged the 20 per cent of property owners not using the system to join up.

The system identifies rural properties in a similar way to an urban number and street address, enabling police to reach them more quickly.

Rickard said the vast majority of emergency calls were dealt with successfully. "I hear the comments but I'm not spinning stories, we take 466,000 calls into our 111 system a year.

"At times, we do make mistakes ... and, as a result, we've taken action to review what's happened and 100 more people are destined to go into our communication centres and help us with deployment."

Pedersen said proposed legislation to grant public access to five-metre walkways alongside significant water bodies that crossed farmland had heightened safety issues.

"We're all spending more on security. Let's face it, that's the world we're living in - which [makes it] even more alarming for us to have more access granted to our properties under those conditions."

He said the present system of permission-based access meant visitors treated access as a privilege and farms with respect. "In a generation's time, we'll have a higher degree of arrogance towards the farmer and his right to farm by the public access-way imposition."

Pedersen said if land access legislation was passed, "part of the compensation we will be expecting as farmers is to be able to have, paid for by the taxpayer, some sort of video surveillance system where required".

Agriculture Minister Jim Sutton said there were no surveillance cameras on the 50 to 70 per cent of waterways already accessible and introducing access to the remaining areas would not cause any problems.

"Especially since the Government's policy excludes walking access within 50 metres of homes and 20 metres of other farm buildings."

But Pedersen said legislated distance restrictions made little difference with isolated farm buildings.

"Twenty metres [restriction from] a farm building could be a kilometre away from the farmstead. You don't know that people are necessarily there."

All locked up

* High-tech security is being used on farms.
* "Tyranny of distance" is isolating farmers from emergency help.
* Proposed public access legislation has heightened security concerns.