A few years ago, Victorian livestock producer Belinda Steers went on a family holiday to Fiji.
"We hadn't even landed and I had a phone call saying that the cattle had gone," she said.
"The fences had been cut and we had only checked them 24 hours previously.
"People know your movements and it always happens when you're not around."
The Avenel resident was the victim of livestock theft — a crime estimated to cost Australian farmers $70 million a year, although that is nearly impossible to measure.
The latest research calculates that 60 per cent of stock theft and other rural crime goes unreported to police.
It is a severe impediment to their work.
"We've got a principal operating strategy of prevention, disruption, and response," Detective Sergeant Damian Nott said.
"We can't do any of those things if we don't know what's happening."
Detective Sergeant Nott is one of 63 members of the New South Wales Police Rural Crime Prevention Team, which is spread across the state.
All of them have specialist rural knowledge and sometimes track criminal activity or stolen stock from horseback.
Each officer on the team carries a gun in order to match the alleged offenders.
"These people are armed," Ms Steers said.
"You never ever approach someone stealing something on your place — you ring the police."
She has heard of instances where alpaca guard animals have been shot by sheep thieves during the course of a robbery.
"It's highly organised and there are multiple different facets to it," Ms Steers said.
Watching from above
Now police and farmers have a new weapon to combat livestock theft — eartags linked to satellites.
The tag, developed and manufactured by Brisbane-based firm Ceres, is the size of a business card and weighs a mere 30 grams.
It monitors and records stock movements and behaviour.
When the tag detects abnormal behaviour, such as sheep running in the dead of night, it sends an alert to a producer's phone.
It also has a geo-locator, and if it detects that the animals have left their paddock it sends a second alert.
That is usually a sign that criminals are at work.
NSW Police has run its own simulated stock "theft" using the tags.
"We understand it was the world's first mock theft scenario with the use of GPS-equipped tags and we did that in conjunction with the University of New England and industry," Detective Sergeant Nott said.
"The opportunity and potential for technology to impact on instances of theft and the opportunity for theft in the rural sector is immense."
'I worked so hard'
Until now the criminals have held most of the cards — especially with the advantage of isolation.
There are unlikely to be witnesses, for example, in a back paddock on a rarely used road.
Then there is the lag time between the crime and its discovery.
It's not that the trail has gone cold — often there is no trail at all, and farmers will often fail to notice a few less head in a herd or flock, even when the count comes up short.
But in January when Kevin Butler of Kilmore, Victoria, went to muster his sheep he suspected immediately he had fallen victim to theft.
Thieves had laid carpet over a fence in a paddock close to a roadway allowing them to run the sheep over it and onto transport.
None of the 381 sheep have been recovered and no-one has been arrested for the crime.
"It was clear to me, once I'd done the research, that crooks get away with it nearly 100 per cent of the time and police need more help," Mr Butler said.
"I understand there are crooks in the world and they have no conscience, but from my perspective … I just kept on repeating 'I've worked so hard,' and I cried for three days.
"I was so hurt."
The sheep had an estimated value of $50,000.
Mr Butler now has sheep fitted with satellite-tracking eartags in all of his flocks.
'Made in heaven'
Ms Steers also has her animals tagged with the satellite trackers, as well as surveillance cameras around her farm that she can monitor on her phone in real time.
"We'd been hit seven times over the past six years and all up you're probably looking at 50, 60, 70,000 dollars," she said.
"We had 84 lambs stolen — they were stolen between lamb marking and weaning."
Livestock theft is more prevalent when stock prices are buoyant and police say that, as life returns to normal after years of COVID-19 restrictions, rural crime is on the rise.
But digital data is helping them put a noose around illegal activity.
Police are gathering, analysing, and sharing crucial data between jurisdictions — from stock movements to financial records — and determining patterns of crime.
Detective Sergeant Nott encouraged all rural people to assess their vulnerability to crime and to take preventative action.
"Look at what measures you can put in place to reduce the risk and keep the crooks out," he said.
"We've got them looking over their shoulders now.
"Let's get them to have a real good think about going somewhere else and getting into another line of business."
The eartags have given Mr Butler some peace of mind.
"It's made in heaven for a farmer," he said.
"It's sort of like having a shepherd out there in your flock the whole time."
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