SASKATOON – Garth Griffin can only shake his head when he thinks about a recent theft at his Osage-area farm.
Thieves made off with nearly 1,000 bushels of canola worth about $7,500 sometime around Oct. 10. Fillmore RCMP don’t have any suspects, and the only lead came from a neighbor, who heard an auger rumbling down the road sometime after midnight.
“I didn’t notice until a couple of weeks later, when I went to get a rod to check for heating and I looked in the bin,” Griffin said. “It was down a fair bit … well, almost empty.”
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Griffin said he may have been able to avert this crime. The prevention was sitting right in his shed. It’s a product called Crop Guard, a confetti-like paper with tiny serial numbers on it. Crop Guard can be mixed into any type of grain to identify which producer it belongs to. The papers are blown out during cleaning and aren’t taken as dockage.
“I had some and I didn’t use it. But I put it in everything that was left (after the theft),” Griffin said.
Only one company markets the confetti – Country Graphics in Rosenort, Man., has been busy this year fielding calls about their 13-year-old product.
“There are about 1,000 farmers using Crop Guard,” said company manager Peter Kroeker. “Over the last couple of years there wasn’t a lot of interest. It nearly died out. It’s almost like farmers didn’t care if grain was stolen because the prices were so low. Of course, now, it’s sort of peaked.”
Kroeker said farmers have also mixed the confetti with granulated fertilizers and rubbed it into sheep wool. One farmer called about putting the papers into a bee hive. “We haven’t heard if it worked or not,” he said.
Each farmer receives a numbered registration card with his order. Also, a postcard with that number is sent to the Winnipeg crime prevention unit, which forwards it to local detachments, Kroeker said.
Elevator agents who see the paper in grain must check with the RCMP or Country Graphics to see who the registered owner is, or the system won’t work.
Patti Smith, spokesperson with Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, said many farmers don’t think about rural crime.
“Rural people think rural Saskatchewan is the safest place in the world to live … they don’t lock up their homes and they don’t protect their equipment,” said Smith.
“The cash value is so high for the operation when a theft happens, but often the farmers are scared to say anything because they don’t want to get involved,” Smith said. “If they call Crimestoppers, they can remain anonymous.”
Griffin said when he plants his second crop of canola next spring, he’ll buy extra insurance, and add more Crop Guard to his grain.
“I guess I learned my lesson this time,” he said.
