Gangs of thieves who target expensive tractors and agricultural machinery, are a real headache in the Netherlands. They enter farm yards undisturbed and take machines away, despite the presence of security cameras. Stolen tractors have been located in Romania.
In several provinces, a tried-and-true recipe is used: thieves show up in the middle of the night, unrecognizable because of hoodies on, and then drive tractors and other machinery out of the yard. If they can’t make it through the driveway, they take a shortcut behind them across meadows or fields. Further on there is a truck in which the loot disappears forever.
There have been reports from various parts of the country, but the province of Flevoland (agriculture polder land area) is particularly affected. The only thing they leave behind, are tire tracks. Currently these robberies occur two to three times a week. Similar thefts have also been reported in Belgium and Germany.
By the police called ‘mobile banditry’, the loot seems to be conducted by international, probably Eastern European, gangs. The stolen machines disappear in trucks as quickly as possible across the border.
The regional police unit Central Netherlands confirms the misery. “Since October last year we have seen a wave of tractor thefts,” a police spokesperson says. “How many tractors exactly are involved is not clear, but there are reportedly at least dozens of cases in the middle of the country alone.”
An obstacle to exact national figures is a lack in the police data system. In it, stolen tractors and ag machinery are not registered as a separate group.
Indications that the robbers are part of international gangs abound. The police spokesperson confirms the arrest last fall of a truck on the Polish-German border. In it were several stolen agricultural machines from the Flevopolder area.
Snapped near the German border In 2021, police narrowly managed to prevent a stolen tractor
from leaving the Netherlands on this stopped truck. © Politie Oost-Nederland
The story of John Deere dealer GroeNoord in the province of Groningen is also telling. In mid-November, thieves took three brand-new tractors from their premises in Oldehove. They smashed a row of bushes and disappeared in the middle of the night to a spot where the machines worth some 100,000 euros each were loaded on a truck.
This theft also has an Eastern European link. “Our tractors have now been located again: they are in Romania,” GroeNoord confirms. Whether the tractors will return and whether any perpetrators have been apprehended, a spokesman cannot say.
Both the “Platform Safe Entrepreneurship”, farmers association ”LTO Netherlands” and farm contractors association “Cumela”, help educate farmers to make their yards less vulnerable to theft. For example, there are driveway alarms and sensors for barn doors. And self-adhesive stickers on the machines, indicating that these are traceable, may deter thieves.
One explanation for Flevoland as an attractive area for these thieves, is that there are hardly any roadside cameras with automatic license plate recognition. These can of course be placed, both in plain sight and concealed. With such cameras it is possible to well filter out the road users who only show up in the polder at suspicious times.
