Vandalism and theft on the farm: Is it time for tougher penalties and enforcement?

Friday, April 8, 2016

Wanton damage and theft on farm properties may not be endemic but, when it happens, it can cost the farmer many thousands of dollars. Farm organizations believe that stronger laws against trespassing and a firmer response by police are needed

by MARY BAXTER

All the appropriate precautions had been made – or so the Wilsons thought. But what the multi-generation farm family who operates a commercial grain elevator near Vankleek Hill would discover early on the morning of Dec. 18 would shatter an assumption so entrenched they thought it was fact: no one in their community would want to harm their property.

The past few weeks had been the busiest by far since the family – Kevin, his brother Gary and their parents, Ian and Susan – launched their elevator business in 2011. Customer numbers were steadily increasing, and the family had promised their clients they would take crops as they were harvested.

What the Wilsons hadn't banked on was the arrival of soybean and corn all at the same time. A delay in the eastern Ontario soybean harvest combined with a dry late fall and a corn crop shaping up to be a local record-breaker created the glut.

They built a temporary bunker silo, but the corn kept coming. So in November, when they learned the delivery of a new grain bin was stalled, the family put the excess into bags for temporary storage.

"We put out four bags, which is roughly around 2,000 tonnes, in these grain bags across the road in one of our fields," Kevin Wilson says. "You could literally see the grain bags from my office."

Around 7:30 a.m. that December morning, as the family met to discuss transferring some of the corn in the bunker silo, the phone rang. On the other end was Gary's brother-in-law. What has happened to your bags? he asked.

"We looked to the right when you drove into the yard and you could see them, somebody had slashed them," Wilson says. "They had sliced about 175 feet on one of them and about 50 feet on another."  

Reported instances of vandalism and theft on the farm might not appear to amount to much in dollar terms. John Taylor, president and CEO of the Ontario Mutual Insurance Association, estimates total farm theft claims in a typical year in Ontario range from $1 million to $2.5 million – the higher number is equal to about four new high-tech combines. "Our (Mutual Insurance) theft claims are less than two per cent of our overall claims, so it's not our major cause of loss by any stretch," Taylor says.

The total number of theft claims that the more than 40 Mutual Insurance members annually process hovers around 60 to 70. Claim numbers and values are similarly low for vandalism, Taylor says.

Data from the member companies, which serve 60 to 70 per cent of the Ontario farm market, indicate that there was a spike in theft claims in 2015 compared to the previous year, although total claim numbers were down. "In 2014, the average on-farm claim would have been $5,500," says Taylor. The 2015 average leapt to $14,000.

It's premature to declare a trend, Taylor cautions. "If I saw 2016 going the same way, it would be interesting to know what's involved."  

Larry Wallace, on the other hand, says on-farm vandalism and damage from trespassing is escalating. "People don't report it; they see it and they say, 'well that happens,'" asserts the semi-retired corporate security specialist, who is a consultant for Ontario's animal agriculture industry.

The contemporary farm's size makes it vulnerable, Wallace and others say. Many farmers no longer live close to the fields they farm. Buildings on other properties become prime targets for vandals and arsonists. In the Niagara and Hamilton regions, 10 incidents of arson took place between 2013 and 2015 in disused or underused barns. No arrest has been made although police suspect the incidents are linked.  

Complicating the issue is the practical, busy farmer's inclination to view something as an accident rather than a crime. "Farmers are by nature trusting people," Wallace says. "I think you have to be very trusting to be in the farming business, because you've got to have faith in the weather that you've got a crop to harvest this year and a buyer to buy your produce at the end."

Local culprit?
The Wilsons are not the sort to be naively trusting. They have experienced break-ins before and now lock doors and remove keys from equipment on their farm that's an hour's drive from Ottawa. They even installed a low-grade trail camera to monitor the bags with mischievous kids or rats in mind. (The camera would record an image of a parked pickup truck the night the bags were cut, although the image was too blurred to be of use).

Yet Kevin Wilson acknowledges a bias towards trust. "In the ag community we live in, we know all of our neighbours on a first-name basis," he explains. "You never expect something like that to happen. There's no financial gain to them." Now, he suspects only someone local would have had strong enough motivation to perform such a malicious act. The possibility of a local culprit in instances of theft and vandalism is high, says Joe Donnermeyer, a world-renowned specialist in rural crime and professor emeritus of environmental social sciences at Ohio State University School of Environment and Natural Resources. He says research to be published in a book he is editing on rural crime indicates that "a great deal" of on-farm crime in the United States, Britain and developed countries – crimes such as dumping trash and farmer-to-farmer theft of items like fuel – "is often committed by a farmer who lives nearby."

Kirk Rankin, though, wonders whether a very public encounter several provinces away sparked a rash of mink releases over the spring and summer of 2015 on Ontario farms, including his own.

It was May and Rankin, then-president of the Canada Mink Breeders Association, was in Richmond, B.C., at the National Animal Welfare Conference, an annual event co-ordinated by the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies.

When another agriculture industry representative challenged information in a well-attended presentation about the fur industry and approached the speaker, Rankin followed.

"I had my (name) tag flipped over, and Lesley Fox (executive director of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals and another featured speaker) says, 'you're from Ontario,'" he says.

He'd never met the animal activist, and claims she grabbed his name tag, turned it around and announced, "'Yep. You're from Ontario, you live in Ontario.'"

The first mink release occurred the same month at a farm two miles from Rankin's St. Marys operation. With the industry long a target of animal rights activists, Rankin had security measures in place at his farm, including a guard dog, fencing and biosecurity warning signs. But it wasn't enough.  

Vandals struck sometime after 11 p.m. on July 7. They crossed the cornfield at the back of the facility and cut the fence in several places. Rankin figures the dog didn't bark because the vandals entered from the back and his dog only barks when people arrive up front. By the time they were done, the vandals had released more than 6,000 animals, the equivalent to more than a fifth of the operation's annual pelt production.

The next morning dawned windy and rainy, and Rankin didn't notice the mink until he stepped out of the front building's rear exit. "There was a ball right in the middle of my laneway, this whole bunch of little mink keeping warm rolling and goofing around."

Days later, vandals struck again, this time near Guelph. The Guelph-area farm was vandalized again in early fall, but by then the farmer had sold his mink, Rankin says. Instead, vandals slashed tires.

Unnamed animal activists claimed responsibility for the first release; Rankin also suspects activists are behind the later events.

Many of the people I spoke to mentioned concerns about on-farm vandalism and theft not being pursued rigorously enough.

"A lot of the stuff police put down as mischief," says Wallace. It's not. "They don't realize the impact it has on that one farmer." Trespassers on four-wheelers in fields can ruin crops. Abandoned vehicles could create oil and gas spills. Dumped construction materials might contain asbestos and PCBs, and it's the farmer who is now legally required to clean it up. "And that cleanup could be thousands and thousands of dollars."

Wallace talks about a disconnect between police and the farm community. More and more, police don't understand farming.

Both Rankin and Wilson immediately contacted police; both speak positively of the support they received. Yet Wilson recalls the officer who responded to his call didn't know how to spell corn. The grain farmer was also told that unless he could demonstrate more than $25,000 of loss the officer would not call in a special unit in the detachment to investigate.

"It shouldn't take that much of a loss to have them investigate something like this," Wilson says. "Basically the potential for several thousand dollars of loss was there. The harm, the malice, the intent was present."

Fines rare
One of the most troubling aspects of Ontario's trespassing legislation is how rarely people are fined, says Mark Kunkel, an Ontario Federation of Agriculture board member and Powassan dairy farmer. "The police don't want to waste their time with it, because it gets thrown out in court all the time." Cases are dismissed because trespass signs haven't been posted. "That's one of the things I'm hearing," he says.

Sgt. Peter Leon, OPP corporate communications media relations co-ordinator, acknowledges the possibility that police serving rural areas may lack knowledge of agriculture.
"To say that something like that doesn't exist would be, perhaps, inaccurate," he says. Police have an obligation to familiarize themselves with the people they serve. "I think the OPP as an organization is all about having positive relationships with the public," he says, "and part of our goal is we have to provide our members with continuous and on-going training. If we have an area, for example, that is experiencing a problem, and it's something that's new to us, or we have new officers coming into an area, we need to educate them."

Last year, the Ontario Federation of Agriculture announced it was lobbying for changes to the Ontario Trespass to Property Act. Kunkel put his name to the federation news release announcing the plan and a new guide to safeguarding farms from property crime. He says the goal is, among other things, to motivate better enforcement by introducing stronger penalties.

Currently, the Act sets $1,000 as the limit for what can be awarded for property damage. The OFA proposes a ceiling of $25,000, which is also the maximum for small claims court.

Donnermeyer says toughening laws has been shown to be an effective deterrent for most types of trespassing – hunters and people involved in a leisure activity who ignore property boundaries and cause property damage.

Two bills now before the provincial legislature address the issue. Private members' Bill 36, Respecting Private Property Act, was introduced in 2014 by Sylvia Jones, Dufferin-Caledon PC MPP, passed second reading the same year and has languished ever since in committee. The bill proposes a minimum fine of $500 for trespassing and raising the ceiling for damages to $25,000.

Bill 100, the Ontario Trails Act, is well on its way to becoming law, having passed second reading in February. The bill proposes changes to five laws, including trespassing legislation, and the introduction of a new Ontario Trails Act. If passed, it would raise the maximum fine for trespassing to $10,000 from $2,000 and remove a cap on damage claims.

But upping penalties won't discourage animal rights extremist activity, warns Donnermeyer. "Most people with an ideological motivation to enter onto a farm are going to do so anyway. It wouldn't matter what the punishments are." (Ideologically-motivated events form a tiny proportion of all vandalism and trespassing incidents, although they can gain significant media attention, Donnermeyer and many others note).

Rankin wonders if legislation such as the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act in the United States might do a better job at keeping animal rights extremists in check. Since the U.S. federal law was enacted, "not nearly as much (animal activist) activity goes on in the States. It's a lot different," he says.

The law targets activity that might damage property, animals and people as well as conspiracy to commit such damage in connection with an animal rights campaign. It contains a sliding scale of fines and penalties that can reach up to 10 years of jail time and require offenders to pay restitution to property owners.

Security cameras added
To date, the crimes at both the Wilson and Rankin farms remain unsolved.

Kevin Wilson considers his family lucky: they could feed the spilled grain to the cattle they finish on their farm. They will use storage bags again. Next time, though, the bags will be kept near the elevator.

Security cameras have been added to monitor the yard with six cameras looking at strategic places overlapping in a loop. Cameras have joined Rankin's security arsenal too, and today he estimates he has $80,000 invested. "I think we're going to keep updating it," he says. He refers to a recent meeting where he learned activists now use drones to cover cameras with paint.

Nor have Rankin's efforts ended at securing his property. Everyone on the farm scrutinizes people who visit or park nearby. "We check in and write down the licence plate number so the police can look it up if something happens," he says.

Rankin recaptured many of the mink that were released but couldn't match them with their records. He euthanized animals he would have normally kept for breeding and has had to rely on lower quality stock.

The incident haunted him for a long time. "You just wake up thinking about it, actually almost in a sweat, and lose your temper." But it also reinforced his resolve to educate the public about his industry.

This year, he'll return to the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies annual meeting in Toronto in April. There, he may well discuss the industry's plans to introduce third-party welfare audits in 2018.

Opening up the industry's approach to animal welfare to greater scrutiny has a precautionary component. It combats misinformation about mink treatment intended to radicalize attitudes, he says. And "maybe then ordinary people won't throw money in the pot to help the extremists." BF

Someone on your property? Don't shoot!
In February, Hamilton media reported the shooting death on a rural property in the Binbrook area. The victim, Jonathan Styres, 29, of Ohsweken, Ont., was shot while he was allegedly trying to steal a truck. Peter Khill, 26, the owner of the property, was charged with second-degree murder.

If you come across a trespasser on your property, but they are leaving, obtain a description of as many details as you can and call police, advises Sgt. Peter Leon, OPP media relations co-ordinator.

Call 911 if there is a person on your property whom you don't know. Don't approach. "You don't know if the individual on your property possesses something that could cause you harm or injury," he explains. "Let us deal with the situation."

He advises strongly against the use of firearms. "It can have very life-altering results for everybody involved." BF

Installing cameras? Check with your municipality first
When installing surveillance equipment, check with your municipality about bylaws that might affect their use.

In a 2015 case before the Ontario Court of Justice in Oshawa, a couple was declared guilty of violating a city bylaw that prohibits "excessive protective elements to land."

According to Justice of the Peace M. Coopersmith's reasons for judgement, the couple, Patricia and Hugh Lee, had 11 surveillance cameras on their property, including one that could rotate 360 degrees and was attached to a television antenna. The couple claimed they were being threatened, harassed, bullied and stalked by neighbours.

In her reasons, Coopersmith said the surveillance cameras "captured much more than what is reasonably appropriate in order to protect the Lees and their property from theft and other criminal activity" and noted the excessive installation intruded "into neighbours' reasonable expectation of privacy and enjoyment on their respective properties." BF

Tips for securing your farm
When it comes to securing the farm, experts agree farmers can do more. If developing a $1-$2 million barn, assign one per cent of the budget to security, advises Jamie Couper, owner, president and CEO of GHC Safety and Security Solutions in Fergus. "You need to make a proper investment. Do a proper plan – and use it," he says.
Some other recommendations:

• Consider obtaining an assessment to determine areas of greatest risk. Security consultant Larry Wallace estimates the service costs $2,000.
• Remove keys from trucks and farm implements when they're not in use. Lock equipment and buildings.
• To discourage trespassers, Wallace advises chaining farm and field access points and adding no trespassing signs.
• Once you acquire security equipment, don't forget to maintain it.
• People might think to check their feeding equipment once power returns or kicks over to the generator, says Couper, "but they don't check the camera system. Well you've got to spend two minutes to do that too."
• Reach out to your local police and educate them about agriculture, says Wallace. "Introduce yourself. Tell them where you are. Tell them about your business. Tell them what your concerns are."
• If you find something on your farm that shouldn't be there or it appears something has been stolen or vandalized, take pictures with your camera before you move anything, says Larry Wallace. And don't attempt to fix anything right away. You might destroy evidence.
• Call police, no matter how minor it might appear, and do it right away. "If you report it, you become the squeaky wheel and you get the attention, because now we're aware there's an issue in a certain area," says Const. Kees Wijnands, Perth County OPP community safety and media relations officer. Even if the investigation doesn't yield immediate results it might help to identify a crime pattern which might eventually help to catch the perpetrator of not only the crime on your property but on others as well. BF