The Demeter Initiative

Author: Sonali

  • Know Your Assets – Waste Crime, Farm Records and the Security Calendar

    Know Your Assets – Waste Crime, Farm Records and the Security Calendar

    Know Your Assets – Waste Crime, Farm Records and the Security Calendar

    When did you last do a proper head count? 

    Not a quick look across the field. A proper count, gate to gate, with every ewe accounted for. 

    Recently, sheep went missing from Diddly Squat Farm and it made the national headlines. Then Thames Valley Police closed the case. There had been no crime, and all the stock was accounted for. The sheep simply hadn’t been counted properly. 

    In a busy season it’s easy to lose track of something. But it raises a fair question: if you can’t say exactly what you’ve got, how would you prove what’s gone? 

    That’s where Episode 29 of Close the Farm Gate begins, and it’s well worth ¾ of an hour of your time. 

    What’s in it for you 

    Frank and Charlie of Rural Safeguard sit down for an honest and sometimes daft chat about foreseeable crime, and what you can do before it arrives at your gate. 

    Waste crime. The episode was recorded during Waste Crime Week. It looks at a Cambridgeshire farmer who had hundreds of lorry loads of processed waste tipped across his field. One load in a gateway is bad luck. Twenty loads is a pattern, and a pattern can be spotted, reported and stopped. Find out why it pays to speak up early to the police, the council and your neighbours. You’ll also hear how a householder who hands rubbish to a man with a van can end up liable for it. 

    Know what you’ve got. You’d never run a flock without records, so why run a workshop without them? Serial numbers, photos and VINs for your quad, GPS units and tools can decide whether a theft case goes somewhere or nowhere. 

    A security calendar for the farming year. Supermarkets tag the meat because they know what gets taken. Builders know that diesel goes missing during groundworks and cable goes missing later on. Farming has its own rhythm too: lambing, drilling, silage, harvest. Each season brings its own risks. Frank and Charlie talk about matching your farmyard defences to the calendar, so you protect what matters most when it matters most. 

    Shutting up shop earlier. Now the nights are drawing in, thieves use the dark evenings while you’re in for tea. Closing the farm gate earlier doesn’t mean shutting people out. It means the people you want on the farm arrive on your terms. 

    Does your alarm actually work? We don’t mean the siren. We mean the response. Who picks up, how long do they take to arrive, and what’s your plan for the first 30 minutes on your own? As one wise old farmer put it: better tin than skin. 

    Why listen? 

    Almost every farmer Frank sits down with says the same thing: “I’ve never looked at my farm like that before. But I will now.” 

    This isn’t scaremongering. It’s plain-speaking knowledge sharing from people with backgrounds in policing, investigation and protective security, so you can act before you have to react. A tweak to your evening routine, a list of what’s in the shed, a gate that can’t be lifted off its hinges: none of it costs much, and all of it helps. 

    The episode ends on a high. Rural Safeguard has been invited to speak to students at Harper Adams and the Royal Agricultural University, so the next generation of farmers can build crime reduction into their business plans from day one. 

    Listen to Episode 29 of Close the Farm Gate now on Spotify, or on the podcast page of the Rural Safeguard website.

    So put the kettle on, kick off your boots and have a listen. Your future self, and your stock, will thank you. 

  • From Gossip to Intelligence: How the National Intelligence Model Can Protect Your Farm

    From Gossip to Intelligence: How the National Intelligence Model Can Protect Your Farm

    From Information to Action: How the National Intelligence Model Can Protect Your Farm

    Ever reported a stolen trailer, a broken gate or a dodgy van in the lane, and then wondered why you bothered? You’re not alone. Plenty of farmers, growers, foresters and land managers don’t report minor incidents because they fall below the insurance excess, or because they believe nothing will come of it. 

    In the latest episode of our podcast, we sit down with Richie Osborne to explain why that small report could be the missing piece of the puzzle that brings down an organised crime gang. Richie is a protective security professional with a background in military intelligence, critical national infrastructure and large-scale government security. 

    From information to intelligence 

    Richie explains the National Intelligence Model (NIM), the framework UK police use to turn raw information into intelligence they can act on. What you see, hear or catch on camera is information. Once it has been gathered, checked, graded for reliability and shared with the right people, it becomes intelligence: something that lets police and partner agencies predict, reduce and disrupt crime rather than simply react to it. 

    The same principle applies on your own farm. When you know what’s normal on your land, you’re far better placed to spot what isn’t, and to make informed decisions about where to put your time, money and security measures. 

    What you’ll learn 

    • The three levels of rural crime: local theft and antisocial behaviour, cross-border gangs that exploit police boundaries, and serious organised crime that steals tractors, GPS units and livestock to order for buyers overseas. 
    • How to judge the information you’re given: why a post on a WhatsApp group isn’t automatically reliable, and how police grade sources and information before they act. 
    • “Presence of the abnormal, absence of the normal”: the military rule of thumb for spotting the warning signs, from unfamiliar vehicles and drones overhead to camera cables cut weeks before a break-in. 
    • How to make your WhatsApp groups stronger: sharing alerts quickly, using photos and video, and keeping control over who joins the group. 
    • Real results: how intelligence from farmers and rural communities fed into Operation Alchemy, a multi-agency operation across Gloucestershire and Herefordshire that led to six arrests and recovered more than £300,000 of stolen equipment. 
    • Protecting your kit: why marking your property (CESAR, forensic microdots and DNA marking) makes your machinery less attractive to steal and harder to sell on. 

    Why it matters to you 

    Crime doesn’t stop at the county line, and neither should our thinking. A theft that seems minor on one farm may match a pattern being seen in three other counties. Your report might not get your quad bike back today, but it could help the police spot a trend, find a gang’s logistics route and reduce the likelihood of the next theft, possibly on your neighbour’s farm or your own. 

    Intelligence also works in your favour. The better the picture the police and rural networks build, the more targeted and useful the alerts you receive will be. That means less generic advice and more warnings you can actually act on, so you can secure what’s at risk before the thieves arrive. 

    As Richie puts it, the aim is to get inside the criminal’s decision-making cycle: to spot the signs early, disrupt their plans and make your farm the one they decide isn’t worth the effort. 

    Listen now 

    Search for Close the Farm Gate podcast on Spotify and look for Episode 28 with Richie Osborne. Grab a brew, put it on in the tractor cab, and hear how the information you already have could be your strongest line of defence. 

    Listen to the Full Episode on Spotify → here

    Then do one simple thing: next time something doesn’t feel right, report it. 

  • Light the Beacon: Sharing Rural Crime Intelligence 

    Light the Beacon: Sharing Rural Crime Intelligence 

    Light the Beacon: Sharing Rural Crime Intelligence

    Tune into Episode 27: Light the Beacon – Sharing Rural Crime Intelligence: Link 

    It’s 2am and a diesel bowser three farms from yours has just been drained dry. A quad bike has gone missing from an unlocked barn. A trailer has disappeared through a gate nobody thought to check. By the time the farmer wakes up to the damage, the offenders are already forty miles down the road, working their way through a list of targets that includes, quite possibly, your yard next. Nobody warned that farmer. Nobody warned you either. That gap, between an incident happening and the people around it finding out, is exactly what the latest episode of the Rural Safeguard podcast sets out to close, and it is why this conversation between Frank Cannon and Paul Crane deserves twenty-five minutes of your time this week. 

    Paul Crane is not a talking head with an opinion and a microphone. He spent over twenty years in protective security across military, government and private sector environments, including critical national infrastructure, before running security for one of the largest farming groups in the country. He now runs Zulu Alpha, a protective security consultancy, and has founded the Countryside Security Collaboration Forum, or CSCF, a free platform built specifically to fix the one thing that frustrated him most in that job: the sheer lack of timely, reliable information about what is actually happening to farms, land and rural businesses around him. 

    That gap is bigger than most people think. The conversation digs into why official rural crime figures barely scratch the surface, relying heavily on a single insurer’s annual report that, by its own admission, only captures a fraction of what is really happening. Add in policy excess levels that discourage reporting anything under a few thousand pounds, and a police recording system with a lag measured in months, and you are left trying to defend your business against a threat you cannot properly see. Frank and Paul are blunt about it: if you are only finding out about crime after it has happened to you, you are always going to be reacting, never defending. 

    That is where CSCF comes in, and it is the heart of this episode. Paul explains the idea behind it using an image that sticks: lighting a beacon. In the past, when a threat appeared on one hilltop, a fire was lit so the next community along could see it coming and prepare. CSCF does the same job for the modern countryside, an instant, web-based alert system that lets anyone, farmers, gamekeepers, landowners, rural pubs, tourism and leisure businesses, even churches and parish councils, report an incident and have every signed-up neighbour warned almost immediately. It solves the problem that WhatsApp groups never could: there is always someone just outside the boundary who never gets the message. With CSCF, the goal is that nobody is left uninformed, because the wider and more connected the network, the harder it becomes for offenders to move quietly from one unprotected site to the next. 

    The episode is also full of the kind of practical, on-the-ground detail that makes the risk real rather than abstract. Frank shares stories straight from his farm security walks: cameras thick with cobwebs that had not recorded a usable frame in months, sensor lights disabled because they were annoying a neighbour, and a full sixteen-camera system that the owner had simply stopped checking because it was never configured properly in the first place. Good kit, installed badly or left unmaintained, gives farmers a comforting illusion of protection while doing nothing to reduce the crime risk. Paul’s response is refreshingly sensible: this is not about turning your farm into a fortress, and it is not about scaring anyone into submission. It is about proportionate, considered decisions, made with decent information, so that a farmyard’s defences match its real crime risk rather than guesswork or wishful thinking. 

    Frank and Paul also talk candidly about where this is heading, including how CSCF is starting to feed into the wider Demeter Initiative, a national, collaborative approach to reducing rural crime that goes beyond information sharing into shared learning, training and signposting to what genuinely works. There is honest discussion, too, about how hard it is to shift attitudes across a hardworking, self-reliant farming community, and why waiting until equipment or livestock has already gone is always the more painful and more expensive path. 

    That is really the choice this episode puts in front of you. You can carry on relying on an insurance excess, a camera you have not checked in months, and the hope that criminals target somebody else’s yard first. Or you can listen to this conversation, understand exactly why the current picture of rural crime is so incomplete, and take five minutes afterwards to sign up to CSCF at cscf.co.uk. Membership is free, for uploading incidents and for receiving alerts alike, and every additional farm, business or landowner who joins makes the whole network stronger for everyone else on it. The best outcome from listening is not just being better informed. It is joining the beacon chain yourself, so that when trouble does show up nearby, you hear about it in time to act, rather than finding out afterwards and simply having to deal with the consequences. 

  • Two Episodes, One Cuppa: Why You Should Tune In to Episodes 25 and 26 

    Two Episodes, One Cuppa: Why You Should Tune In to Episodes 25 and 26 

    Two Episodes, One Cuppa: Why You Should Tune In to Episodes 25 and 26

    We got carried away. Charlie was just back from three weeks in London, Frank had come straight off a dairy farm audit with a report due that night, and what was meant to be a normal episode turned into an hour and thirty-seven minutes of the kind of conversation you’d have leaning on a gate. Rather than trim it to the bone, we’ve split it into two episodes and dropped them on the same day. Pick one, or make a flask and do both. 

    1. Episode 25 – From the Farm Gate Up 

    The first half is all about what actually happens in the yard, particularly after dark. Frank explains why every farm review he does includes a night visit, because that’s when the criminal turns up, and that’s when you find out whether the sensor light works, how far it throws, and whether your cameras can still see anything once the sun goes down. 

    The bit you’ll want to hear is the stable yard break-in caught on camera. Two lads, a torch, a gate latch, and a motion-activated light that cost about seventy quid. Watch what happens when it clicks on. It’s the best argument for affordable, well-placed lighting you’ll ever hear, and you’ll come away knowing what to look for on your own footage. 

    You’ll also hear about a gamekeeper intimidated into opening his gates for hare coursers, a telehandler ram-raid on a cash machine in a lit high street, and why neither of those crimes is victimless. Then Frank reports back from a food security conference where MI5 and MI6 were on the stage and nobody, not once, mentioned cyber. If your milking parlour, feed system or grain store runs on software, that silence should worry you. There’s a simple question in there worth asking yourself: if the automation failed tomorrow, could you revert to traditional processes?

    2. Episode 26 – From Whitehall Down 

    The second half starts with the Director General of MI5 calling for government, business and communities to work together, and asks what that means for a farm in the Somerset or a forestry block in Northumberland. Frank walks through The Demeter Initiative and the “coalition of the willing” it needs: government, police, insurers, retailers, academics, and, most importantly, farmers with a proper voice in the room. There’s also news. Rural Safeguard is becoming a not-for-profit, so any sponsorship or grant goes straight into the programme. 

    Then Charlie plays the cynic, and it’s worth the wait. Wiltshire Police’s “whole force response” versus Thames Valley’s dedicated rural crime task force, whether rural officers dropped into neighbourhood teams simply get swallowed up, what happens when Police and Crime Commissioners disappear, and whether we’d all be better off with one national police service. Frank disagrees with most of it. You’ll finish knowing how your local policing is actually structured, who to ask for by name, and how to hold them to account.

    3. What you can use straight away  

    Walk your yard at night and think like the thief who plans to steal your property. Check your lights and cameras in the dark, not in daylight. Tidy the workshop so a missing tool is obvious. Ask who supplies your inputs and who buys your outputs, and what happens if either disappears. Find out which rural crime officer covers your postcode. None of it costs much, and all of it makes you a harder target. 

    Two episodes, one conversation, and a cow joke at the end. Give them a listen, and if you’ve got a story of your own, tell us. That’s how this works.

    Tune into the episodes on Spotify: Episode 25 and Episode 26

     

  • Frank Cannon on R2Kast: Rural Crime, Farm Security and the Demeter Initiative

    Frank Cannon on R2Kast: Rural Crime, Farm Security and the Demeter Initiative

    Frank Cannon on R2Kast: Rural Crime, Farm Security and the Demeter Initiative

    Through Close the Farm Gate, the aim has always been to bring rural voices into conversation and share knowledge from across the rural community. 

    Now we’re taking it further. Our Programme Director, Frank Cannon, recently appeared on R2Kast to discuss rural crime, farm security and the Demeter Initiative. 

    The focus was towards the changing nature of rural crime, understanding vulnerabilities on farms, and taking a practical, layered approach to security. 

    Rural crime is no longer a financial issue; the impact of incidents equally affects the physical and mental wellbeing of those living and working in rural communities. 

    The Demeter Initiative takes this wider view into consideration and recognises that rural crime requires a collaborative strategy. It brings together farming, policing, government, insurers, food retailers, academia and protective security consultants to strengthen rural resilience and reduce exposure to crime risk. 

    At its heart is a simple principle: move left of the event by reducing the likelihood of an incident while ensuring that appropriate response and enforcement remain part of the wider crime risk management system. 

    Rural crime awareness starts with valuable conversations, and this is one worth listening to.

    Take a look at the Demeter Initiative: The Demeter- Initiative – ruralsafeguard  

    Listen to the full conversation on R2Kast: Link

    Or tune into the conversation on Close the Farm Gate: Link

     

  • Frank Cannon on the Farmers Weekly Podcast: Closed Workshops for Tackling Rural Crime

    Frank Cannon on the Farmers Weekly Podcast: Closed Workshops for Tackling Rural Crime

    Frank Cannon on the Farmers Weekly Podcast: Closed Workshops for Tackling Rural Crime

    A recent episode of The Farmers Weekly Podcast featured our Programme Director, Frank Cannon, where he highlighted how organised criminals research the methods used to investigate crime, making it easier for them to circumvent detection. 

    He also explains why Rural SafeGuard follows a risk-based approach to sharing information through its crime reduction workshops, helping farmers access practical knowledge without putting sensitive information into the public domain. 

    We would like to thank Farmers Weekly for the opportunity to join the conversation. 

    It is important that the wider agricultural community has the knowledge it needs to better prepare for and defend against organised crime. 

    Listen to Frank Cannon’s discussion: Link  

    Listen to the full podcast here: Link

  • Why You Should Press Play on Episode 24 

    Why You Should Press Play on Episode 24 

    Why You Should Press Play on Episode 24

    Inspector Andy Lemon and Emily, Wiltshire Police, in conversation with Frank Cannon 

    There are two kinds of people in the countryside: those who have had something nicked, and those who haven’t had something nicked yet. Whichever camp you’re in, this episode is for you. 

    Frank welcomed two guests to the global shedquarters this week – Inspector Andy Lemon, Wiltshire Police’s tactical lead for rural crime, and Emily, the force’s rural crime coordinator. Andy arrived with two pips on his shoulder and a few decades of policing behind him. Emily arrived, in Frank’s words, “a little bit nervous”, then proceeded to deliver the single most useful piece of advice in the whole episode. You’ll have to listen to find out what it was. 

    1. What you’ll learn 

    So what will you actually learn? Quite a lot, as it turns out. 

    You’ll discover why Wiltshire – the second-smallest police force in the country, with a budget that Andy politely describes as “not a lot going in our favour” – has torn up the traditional rural crime team and scattered its officers across the county instead. It sounds like a cost-cutting exercise. It isn’t. It means that when you tap your postcode into the police website, the name of your rural crime officer sits alongside your neighbourhood inspector. Someone who knows your lane, your gateways, and probably your dog. 

    You’ll learn what “whole force response” really means when your 999 call lands in a control room already juggling eighty live incidents. Spoiler: it isn’t just a panda car. Firearms, roads policing, dogs, drones, and on a good day the helicopter. Andy explains how the trigger plan works and, crucially, why it didn’t work four years ago. 

    You’ll hear how criminals treat your stolen quad bike like a suspicious parcel. They take it, dump it somewhere quiet, and wait a day or two to see if anyone comes looking. If nobody does, they know there’s no tracker. Andy explains what to do about that, and why a nearly empty fuel tank might be your best friend. 

    You’ll get the inside story on the multi-force operation that put more than eighty officers, vehicle examiners, the Environment Agency and Wiltshire Council on the A303 and A419 over two days. Frank was there. He’ll tell you it wasn’t the police’s first rodeo. 

    And you’ll learn why rural crime is seasonal, where Wiltshire’s hare coursing hotspots really are, which side of the county the trouble drifts towards, and why fly tipping is one job where the police happily play second fiddle. 

    2. Why listen to Andy 

    But here’s why you’ll benefit from listening to Andy specifically. He isn’t a spokesperson. He’s the man who writes the delivery plan and gets held to account for it. He talks about prevention, preparation and pursuit without a single PowerPoint slide, and he’s refreshingly honest about what a small force can and cannot do. When Frank asks whether rural communities get a worse service than the towns, Andy doesn’t flinch. 

    3. Then the conversation takes a turn 

    Frank asks about the courts. Andy describes a case: multiple occupants in an uninsured car at one in the morning, lurchers in the back, lamps in the footwell, a failure to stop for police, and not one of them from Wiltshire. Everything you’d need for a going-equipped charge. The case was discontinued in court, with no consultation and no explanation. 

    “I’m still quite angry about it,” Andy says. “If I’m being brutally honest.” 

    Frank has to gently steer him away before he says something he’ll regret. 

    What happened in that courtroom, and what Andy is doing about it now, is where the episode really catches fire. We can’t print it here. You’ll have to press play. 

  • Not Opportunists, But Entrepreneurs: Inside the Business of Rural Crime with Dr Kate Tudor 

    Not Opportunists, But Entrepreneurs: Inside the Business of Rural Crime with Dr Kate Tudor 

    Not Opportunists, But Entrepreneurs: Inside the Business of Rural Crime with Dr Kate Tudor

    Why every farmer, grower, forester and land manager should give this episode an hour of their day 

    Let’s start with a confession. Most of us, when the quad bike vanishes or the GPS unit disappears off the roof of the tractor, tell ourselves a comforting little story. It was a chancer. Some lad wandered past an open gate, saw a shiny thing, and helped himself. Bad luck, nothing more. 

    Dr Kate Tudor would like a word. 

    Kate is a criminologist at Durham University who has spent the best part of a decade doing something most of us would rather not: sitting down with the people who steal from farms and asking them, politely, how they go about it. She wrote the National Rural Crime Network’s landmark 2024 report on organised rural crime, and in this episode she joins Frank (Charlie is still away earning his crust in London) for a conversation that will make you look at your yard, your machinery and your WhatsApp group very differently. 

    1. Meet the Alan Sugars of the illicit world 

    The headline from Kate’s research is blunt: the people targeting rural businesses are not opportunists. They are, in her words, “illicit entrepreneurs”, and she compares them to Alan Sugar operating in the shadow economy. They read markets. When the price of metal rises, they steal metal. When quads are scarce, they fill the gap with stolen ones. When sanctions hit a country that runs on Western machinery, they spot a new export line. They have supply chains already in place, from Facebook Marketplace (where Kate cheerfully admits she can spot a stolen quad within two minutes) to buyers overseas. 

    Why does that matter to you? Because you cannot defend against something you misunderstand. If you think the threat is a passing chancer, you buy a padlock. If you understand it is a well-organised business that has researched your farm before you have finished breakfast, you start thinking like a defender. Understand their motivation, capability and method, as Frank says, and you can build your defences before the attack occurs.

    2. The crime that slips through the cracks 

    Here is the clever bit, and the frustrating bit. These groups deliberately keep each theft small. Four quads from one county, five from the next, six from the one after that. Individually, no force takes much notice. Collectively, it is a serious organised crime spree, but because the 43 forces of England and Wales are not always talking to each other, nobody joins the dots. Kate found forces that did not know what their own top-ten offenders were up to just over the county line. 

    When the dots are joined, it works. Kate recounts how the National Rural Crime Unit pieced together GPS thefts that individual forces had shrugged off, revealing a gang working its way across Europe. The result was prison sentences. Your report of “just one GPS unit” might be the piece that completes the picture. 

    3. Police reform: the best thing or the worst thing to happen to rural communities

    The Home Office plans to merge the county forces into fewer, larger regional services, and the National Rural Crime Network’s week of action is dedicated to making sure rural communities do not get lost in the process. Kate, who is advising the Home Office and a parliamentary select committee, is candid: this could be brilliant or disastrous. Bigger forces could finally fix the cross-border intelligence problem, or they could quietly suck resources towards the cities and leave rural crime teams disbanded, as she has already watched happen. 

    She and Frank dig into what good looks like, using Thames Valley Police as the model, and into eyebrow-raising obstacles such as chief officers who still refuse to let rural crime teams use WhatsApp. If you have ever received a newsletter about last month’s diesel thefts three weeks after your own diesel went missing, you will nod along with feeling. 

    4. What you can actually do about it 

    This is not an hour of doom. It is practical and, at times, rather funny. Kate’s closing message is a to-do list you can start today: think securely, because every offender she has interviewed will exploit any vulnerability; join your local rural WhatsApp group, one of the most effective crime reduction tools going; build a relationship with your rural crime team; and report everything, including the suspicious van that did not quite do anything. Around 28% of victims never report, and every silent victim makes the problem look smaller and leaves the police with less to fight for. 

    There is a challenge for you as a customer too: next time you buy kit, ask the dealer why the construction version of the front loader is better protected than the agricultural one. 

    5. Why tune in 

    Because the people stealing from you have done their homework, and this is your chance to do yours. You will come away understanding who is targeting you, why you reporting your incident  matters far more than you think, and what the coming police shake-up means for your parish. Put the kettle on (Kate was on a pint of water, sadly), pull up a chair and give it a listen. Then check your diesel tank, because you will want to. 

    Free resources, including the 49 to 9 paper and the Demeter Initiative, are available on the resources page at ruralsafeguard.com. No email address required, just take it and use it. 

  • The Police Aren’t the Problem. The System Is.

    The Police Aren’t the Problem. The System Is.

    The Police Aren’t the Problem. The System Is.

    Every farmer has a story. The quad bike that vanished from a locked shed overnight. The GPS steering unit stripped off the tractor cab in a field, gone before anyone noticed. The fly-tipped mattress and fridge dumped in the ditch that nobody will take responsibility for. And after it happens, the same frustration follows: why didn’t the police catch them? Why does nobody ever get charged? It’s easy to conclude the police simply aren’t bothered about rural crime. 

    In episode 22 of Close the Farm Gate, Frank Cannon and Charlie Frank make the case that this frustration, while understandable, is aimed at the wrong target. The problem isn’t that individual officers don’t care about your farm. It’s that the system behind them was never built to cope with the crime we’re seeing today. 

    Consider this: there are 49 separate police forces operating across the UK, each with its own budget, its own priorities, and its own way of doing things. A criminal gang stealing GPS units in one county can cross a border and become somebody else’s problem, quite literally, with different data, different lessons learned, and different levels of investment thrown at rural crime depending on where you happen to farm. 

    Then there’s training. Frank shares a startling comparison in the episode: a British Army colonel receives 72 weeks of leadership development over the first 15 years of their career. A chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, doing a broadly comparable job, gets a fraction of that, sometimes as little as two or three weeks. That’s not a criticism of the officers themselves. It’s evidence that the structure they’re operating within hasn’t kept pace with the scale of the job. 

    This is what pushed Frank to spend three months researching and writing a detailed paper on reforming UK policing, off the back of a Home Office white paper that itself admitted the current system is “not fit for purpose.” He explains his thinking using a telescope analogy that’s genuinely one of the most useful ideas in the episode. 

    A while back, Frank created something called The Demeter Initiative, looking at rural crime from one end of the telescope: the private security industry’s perspective. The question was, what value can commercial security consultants and crime reduction advisers bring to the table, working alongside police, to reduce the risk of rural crime before it happens? 

    Writing the police reform paper meant turning the telescope around and looking through the other end: the policing perspective. Instead of private security asking “how can we help the police,” Frank asked “how could policing itself be restructured to make that help easier to use?” Counter-terrorism policing and retail crime policing already lean on private sector expertise in a formal, structured way. Frank’s argument is that rural crime deserves the same recognition. 

    That’s really the sequence Frank wants to see. First, get policing to formally recognise and work with commercial security consultants, so the reactive response farmers rely on today, the call after the theft has already happened, is properly supported and augmented rather than stretched thin. Then, once that partnership exists, channel it through The Demeter Initiative to shift the whole conversation away from responding after a crime and towards reducing the likelihood of it happening at all: better designed equipment, better shared intelligence, and better use of everyone’s eyes and ears across the countryside, not just the odd patrol car passing by. 

    For farmers, growers, foresters and land managers listening, the takeaway isn’t complicated. Stop pinning your hopes on the police alone to solve rural crime. It was never designed as a single-force job, and the current structure makes that painfully clear. What does help is understanding where the gaps are and why, so that when you invest in your farmyard, your machinery, or a security review, you’re doing it with your eyes open rather than waiting for someone else to fix a system that’s been broken for years. 

    There’s also a practical thread worth listening for: how thieves are already exploiting the gap between old-style manual farming and new autonomous technology, why fly-tipping enforcement still doesn’t have a proper reporting hotline despite tens of millions being spent on it, and how skills already paid for through the defence budget could be redirected to support rural policing without a single soldier appearing on a country lane. 

    Frank has sent his paper to several policing organisations and the Home Office directly, and you can find it by searching his name on LinkedIn. Listen to episode 22 of Close the Farm Gate to hear the full conversation, and if it changes how you think about protecting your farmyard, share it with someone else who farms, grows, or manages land. As always: stay safe, stay curious, and close the farm gate. 

  • Episode 21: From Farm Gate to Firewall

    Episode 21: From Farm Gate to Firewall

    Episode 21: From Farm Gate to Firewall

    Why Every Farmer, Grower and Land Manager Should Give an Hour to This Podcast 

    Ask most farmers what keeps them up at night and you’ll hear about the weather, input costs, or low market prices. Increasingly, though, there’s a quieter risk creeping onto the list: what happens if the technology running your farm stops doing what you tell it to? 

    In the latest episode of our podcast, I sit down with Matt Morgan, a cybersecurity professional who’s spent nearly twenty years protecting critical infrastructure — and who also happens to help run the IT on his in-laws’ Somerset dairy farm. Between us, we cover a lot of ground: robotic milking parlours, self-driving tractors, grain store sensors, and the very real people trying to exploit them. If you manage a farm, a grower business, or any land-based operation that now relies on connected equipment, this conversation was made for you. 

    Here’s why it’s worth your time, and what you’ll walk away with. 

    1. Your farm is more “connected” than you think

    Most of us picture farm technology as the office laptop that handles invoices and livestock passports. But modern farms run on something bigger: operational technology, or OT — the sensors, robots, and automated systems that physically control your business. Cows wearing health sensors, robotic parlours that milk, weigh and feed automatically, tractors that steer themselves, and grain stores that regulate their own temperature are all examples. The distinction matters, because when this equipment is compromised, the impact isn’t just data loss — it’s a physical one. A hacked HVAC system in a poultry shed, for instance, could raise the temperature overnight and kill the entire flock before anyone notices. A jammed signal on an autonomous machine in a field could let someone strip it for parts while it sits there, disabled and unable to call for help. This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening, and it’s the kind of consequence that goes well beyond an inconvenient IT outage — think lost yield, dead livestock, ruined reputations, and in the worst cases, a business that simply can’t recover. 

    2. The cost of doing nothing

    That’s really the heart of this episode. Farms are adopting powerful, efficient technology faster than they’re adopting the habits needed to protect it. Matt shares real examples of robotic parlours installed with data cables run bare across sheds, no protection from rodents let alone criminals, feeding into a computer gathering dust in an attic. If that cable is cut or that machine is compromised, there’s often no fallback plan — because the old, slower system it replaced was quietly decommissioned. And it isn’t only about equipment failure. Ransomware attacks, where criminals lock your systems and demand payment, are increasingly common, and many now come with a second threat: if you don’t pay, they’ll sell your data — supplier details, financial records, personal information — to the highest bidder. Doing nothing isn’t a neutral choice. It’s a bet that it won’t happen to you. 

    3. The practical advice you’ll actually use 

    What makes this episode useful rather than just alarming is the amount of straightforward, actionable advice Matt offers. A few highlights: keep your farm office computer network completely separate from the network running your operational equipment, so a problem in one doesn’t automatically become a problem in the other. Ask hard questions before you buy new kit — can you set a strong password, can it be changed, has the equipment been security tested — and be prepared to walk away if the answer is no. Keep a manual, low-tech fallback for your most critical processes, whether that’s a traditional way of checking grain temperature or simply more hands on deck if the robots go down. And don’t overlook cyber insurance — many providers now expect to see evidence of basic protections before they’ll pay out. 

    Central to the conversation is Cyber Essentials, a government-backed scheme that gives any farm business, large or small, a straightforward way to check its own defences. The standard version is a self-assessed checklist covering the basics — backups, passwords, multi-factor authentication — and costs around £320 plus VAT. For higher-risk operations, Cyber Essentials Plus adds an independent assessor and even a penetration test, essentially someone trying to break in on purpose so you can fix the gaps before a criminal finds them. It isn’t a guarantee against attack, but it’s a genuine baseline, and it can strengthen your position with suppliers, insurers, and customers alike.

    4. The takeaway 

    Nobody expects a farmer to become a cybersecurity expert. But just as you’d have a vet, an agronomist, and a mechanic on speed dial, this episode makes the case for adding one more contact to that list. Technology has transformed what a modern farm can achieve — but only if it keeps running. Give this episode a listen, have the conversation with your family or your team afterwards, and take the first small step. It might be the most valuable hour you spend on the business all month.