Lincolnshire farmers lose £1.6m of GPS kit to tractor thieves in one harvest

Thieves stole GPS guidance units worth £1.6m from tractors and combines on Lincolnshire farms between July and the end of September, the county’s police force said on Tuesday, as it launched night-time drone patrols over the Wolds and the Fens in an attempt to stop a crime that has doubled in two years.

Lincolnshire police recorded 109 thefts of the satellite units, which steer machines along fields to within two centimetres and can cost £15,000 each, during the three months of harvest, against 51 in the same period of 2024. The force believes most were taken by three organised gangs travelling from the Midlands and the north-west, who can remove a unit from a cab in under four minutes and sell it in eastern Europe within a week.

“This is not a lad with a screwdriver. These are teams with a van, a lookout and a buyer waiting,” said Detective Chief Inspector Paul Treadwell, who leads the force’s rural crime unit. “They come at two in the morning, they know which yard has which machine, and they are back on the A1 before the farmer’s dog wakes up. We recovered one unit in a container at Felixstowe addressed to Lithuania.”

The thefts come at the worst time: a tractor without its guidance cannot drill or spray with the precision modern farming depends on, and replacement units have a lead time of up to six weeks. One Wolds farm lost units from three machines on a single night in August and had to hire a contractor to drill 200 hectares of wheat.

“The insurance pays eventually, but the crop does not wait for the insurance,” said Charlotte Dennis, who farms 600 hectares near Louth and chairs the county branch of the National Farmers’ Union. “We have put cameras up, we have put the machines in a locked shed, and they came through the roof of the shed. My husband sleeps in the yard at harvest. That is where we are.”

The police patrols, funded by £240,000 from the police and crime commissioner, will use two thermal-imaging drones to watch farmyards and machinery stores between midnight and 5am, directed by a map of previous thefts. The force has also begun a scheme to mark units with forensic liquid and register their serial numbers on a national database, which 1,100 farms have joined since August.

Dealers say the units are rarely seen again in Britain. A forensic marking firm found a Lincolnshire unit in a tractor in Poland last year, and police in the Netherlands have traced stolen British units to Ukraine, where farming has continued through the war with equipment bought on the grey market.

Nationally, rural crime cost £52m last year, according to the insurer NFU Mutual, with GPS theft the fastest-growing category. Treadwell said the force had made nine arrests since the summer and charged four men from Greater Manchester, who are due before Lincoln crown court in January.