28,500 copies distributed monthly – to every rural mailbox in Canterbury and the West Coast.
INSIDE Pages 23–26
Boarding Schools
Pages 36–37
Effluent feature Pages 38–39
Canterbury Groundspreaders
Surge in stock rustling could kill someone’ by Hugh de Lacy The rustling of 86 dairy cows from an isolated North Canterbury farm has given weight to calls by Federated Farmers’ national rural security spokesperson Katie Milne, of Lake Brunner in Westland, for a crackdown “before someone is killed.” The cows, worth around $130,000, were taken in midMay in two truckloads, one of 50 cows and the other of 36, from a farm on Thongcaster Road, north of the Waimakariri River Gorge, near Oxford. Milne has been ringing the alarm bells on livestock rustling since the unsolved seeming disappearance last year of 300 cows from the Lake Brunner Estate, close to where she farms. That disappearance is compounded by animal welfare issues and is still before the courts, but the extent and value of stock-rustling nationwide is alarming farmers in both islands. “It’s horrendous,” Milne told Canterbury Farming.
CONTACT US Canterbury Farming 03 347 2314
August 2012
“Rustling’s on the rise so we’re talking to the Police and trying to put together a step-bystep organised approach to what we can do. “In the Oxford case there are truckers and there might be an agent involved: when it’s big scale like that there have got to be more people in the know.” The timing of the Oxford theft, from a property on which
the milking shed is isolated from the homestead, was timed to coincide with drying off so the owner would not be immediately alerted by a drop in milk production, and cow numbers would be briefly blurred by culling. “There was head-count done on May 3, and they were there, then again on May 16-17 when they were ID tagging the herd,” Kieran Stone, chairman of the North Canterbury Dairy Section of Federated Farmers told Canterbury Farming. The tagging was done over two days and it revealed the identity of every cow that had gone missing in the previous fortnight. While the rustling of sheep and beef cattle for illegal backyard butchery operations was of enough concern, it was clear that the dairy cows were destined for on-sale to other farmers unsuspecting or otherwise. “I’ve asked myself, how the hell does this happen with herd records and such a high percentage of people having them recorded through LIC (Livestock Improvement Company),” Stone said. “When you buy cows in you put them on the LIC database and have them all recorded. “These ones have not been put into the database because LIC are looking out for them coming through their system.” Instead, the receivers of
the stolen stock are removing the identification tags and then “creating a cow” to put on the records. “Say it’s a Friesian, about six years old, it hasn’t got any breeding worth or breeding records, but it can quietly be put into the system,” Stone said. However, LIC was on the lookout for any farmer “creating” more than about 20 cows. “There’s probably a legitimate guy on the end of it that buys them, then he tries to ‘create’ them, and there might have been a brass tag or something left in them and it’s all put in the records and something goes ‘Ping’. “Hopefully something like that happens, but as time goes on the chances of finding them becomes more remote.” Stone said the incident was “huge.”
Oxford
“I’ve never heard of anything happening on this scale before.” It has occurred at a time when the incidence of rustling appears to be on the rise, apparently in the wake of the global economic downturn. Other rustling stories in the news recently include: • Gisborne and Wairoa farmers teaming up with community and rural Police to combat rustling throughout the East Coast; • South
Auckland
farmers
gearing up for a battle with rustlers after the disappearance of hundreds of sheep and beef cattle from dozens of farms, with Auckland provincial president Wendy Clark saying she suspected they were being stolen to meet weekly meat orders; • Last November more than 500 sheep, worth about $40,000, were stolen from three South Canterbury farms, including 200 inlamb merino ewes from Ribbonwood Station; • Farms along Waikato’s west coast were last year hit with a wave of rustling of sheep and cattle, with shots being fired not only to kill livestock but apparently also as a warning against farmers taking action; • Last November Rotorua farmer Paddy Lowry, who over the years had lost sheep in mobs of up to 30,
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found others “running round with bullet holes in them” and warned that there was danger of a human fatality, a warning lately repeated by Katie Milne. The Police have had recent successes in prosecuting rustlers, including two men running a slaughterhouse in a Napier garage, a man charged with the theft of stock from neighbouring Wellsford farmers Arthur Mayall and Jon Boyd, and two men being charged in the Wanaka court with stealing more than $240,000 worth of stock over two and a half years. Sergeant Graeme Crossan of the Rangiora Police told Canterbury Farming that farmers need to be on the lookout for “vehicles or people who don’t fit in with the environment,” and to report them to the Police.