The initiative aims to raise awareness to those in the farming community of the ongoing rural crime and theft epidemic.

IFA rural crime prevention executive Colin Connolly said the organisations have seen a great response to the campaign and a spike in visitors to the Theftstop database since last week’s launch.

More than 3,000 users visited the site in the first week of the campaign. The majority of these were new visitors to the site signing up to the service, while others were previous users updating machinery lists and their own database.

Reducing the risk

As part of the programme, the organisations are urging farmers to register their machinery and equipment on the Theftstop.ie database. They will then receive a unique ID code and be able to label their equipment with this, before uploading a photograph of the machinery to the database. Equipment which is marked is seen as much harder to sell on by criminals and is therefore less likely to be stolen.

Figures from the Central Statistics Office show that almost 30,000 farm-related crimes have been reported to Gardaí since 2010.

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