Hundreds of tractors are being stolen in an extraordinary crimewave that is worth £3 million a year and affects most counties in rural Britain.
They are particular about their pickings, and have a penchant for the distinctive green and yellow tractors of the John Deere brand. John Deere tractors usually cost between £63,700 and £75,000, and even second-hand models can be sold for up to £50,000. Some top-of-the-range tractors cost more than £100,000.
Taking that second hand value £3 million a year is 60 a year. So that "hundreds" looks like a tad of hyperbole, don\’t you think?
Judging by the plant that gets nicked around here I think the £3 million is an underestimate. Last year in one night over £50,000 worth of kit was nicked from one farm in the village – didn’t even make the local paper or self congratulatory police press release on crime numbers that month.
It is amazing how journalists bandy these figures about and never bother to divide one by the other (just to see if the numbers stack up).
I wouldn’t dream of owning a £65,000 car without a tracker system (or two!). Don’t tractors get fitted with that kind of kit?
Maybe someone should have bought them a calculator for Christmas?
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For reasons I don’t want to divert to, I was initially made aware of regular dodgy dealings in new tractors just over 20 years ago. From a certain recently closed manufacturing plant oop north, some newly built tractors just disappeared, as did some of those large tyres fitted on tractors.
Those were times before satellite tracking was feasible outside military applications. However, I was told that by chance one missing tractor had been located in north Africa.
Surely its more likely that the second-hand valuation given is too high – a view reinforced by those weasel words ‘up to’?
Unfortunately you are all barking up the entirely wrong tree, these tractors are obviously being stolen by government agencies so that our beloved leader can say
” Tractor production is up once more ! there can be no praise high enough of the heroic workers in the tractor factories who against the odds have once again exceded the tractor prodution targets and have allowed the farmers to continue in their heroic struggle to feed the nation despite the theft, by these scurrilous free market capitalist criminals, of their means of production” (slight pause for breath) “Going forward, learning from the lessons of past tractor production targets, we shall take hard decisions, pro-actively involving the heroic workers in setting our new and improved targets, and the shake up that this will entail, while meeting the needs of fiscal arithmetic and recognising the diversity, in fact positively encouraging the diversity in the heroic tractor manufacturing industry, we shall persevere”
No More Questions.