Private security patrols are being used to protect crops and expensive farm equipment amid a rural crime wave in England and Wales, the BBC has learned.

Farmers have told the BBC that police rarely solve rural offences and are not doing enough to tackle organised crime.

Suspects are almost 25% more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside, BBC analysis of data has found.

The Home Office says forces plan to tackle the “challenges” of rural crime.

Last year, Eveey Hunter’s farm, in rural Hertfordshire, was devastated by a crime wave targeting machinery.

One night in late summer, GPS components costing £20,000 each were cut out of all three of her tractors, halting work for three weeks.

“We got back to the field at seven o’clock in the morning after leaving at one o’clock in the night and my brother said over the radio ‘we won’t be doing any farming today’,” she says.

“We would have finished harvest the next day.”

Rural crime — Image caption, Insurer NFU Mutual says international organised crime is targeting expensive machinery

Eveey says she’s since learned, through her own detective work, that more than 30 other tractors also had the components removed on farms nearby as well as in East Anglia on the same night.

She believes organised crime groups are now targeting farmers and using ports to take the equipment abroad.

“I drive the tractors at night and I’ll be there in the dark on my own and I don’t want to be faced with these people, it’s scary,” she says. “All we’re trying to do is feed the nation,” she adds.

Eveey says she reported the thefts immediately to the police but a forensics team wasn’t sent until two days later. By the time they arrived, she had been forced to send the tractors away for repair.

Nobody has been charged for the thefts. Hertfordshire Police say officers attended the scene but the investigation was conducted by a different force.

And Eveey isn’t alone. BBC analysis has found that in rural areas, 31,411 suspects were charged for 455,845 recorded crimes in 2021 – a rate of 6.89%. In urban areas, 325,727 charges were handed out for 3,809,865 offences, a rate of 8.55%.

That means the proportion of suspects being charged for offences in towns and cities is 24% higher than in the countryside, according to BBC analysis of crime outcomes broken down to local neighbourhoods.