It's been a disturbing start to the year for professional machinery dealerships around the UK, with a number of audacious break-ins reported, resulting in the loss of valuable turfcare machinery.

It’s a scenario which groundsmen and greenkeepers around the country will unfortunately be all too familiar with, what with the depressingly regular reports I see on social media of equipment being stolen from sheds and workshops.

TurfPro’s sister title for professional dealerships, Service Dealer, was recently told about the Newton, Wales branch of Freestyle (previously known as Wadhurst Country Services) that was raided on New Year's Day.

Sue Port told us at the time how raiders had smashed their way into the dealership through a wall, evading the alarms by staying close to the edge of the building where somehow the security system failed to notice the intrusion.

A similar shocking story cropped up this past week where a dealership was targeted with brute force resulting in the loss of valuable stock.

The Bournemouth Echo reported how dealers Penn Lawn Mowers in Ringwood were targeted by thieves who broke through a brick wall in order to steal over a dozen valuable chainsaws. If that wasn’t hurtful enough, the paper reports how one of the saws was a very rare Husqvarna 562XP which is actually unavailable in the UK. Apparently, the owners' son was a collector who owned the rare piece.

The paper quotes Dawn Smith, who owns the business along with her husband Roland, as saying, "Things like this hit us very hard. It’s soul destroying when you work all the hours to have your own business and then things like this happen.

“It’s a shock this has happened. It’s never happened to us in the 16 years we’ve been open, although we’ve had people trying to do things over the years."

The report then goes on to say how the local police are investigating but they are not yet linking the robbery to a similar incident which saw another machinery retailer in the Bournemouth area ram-raided earlier in January

Ashington Garden Machinery were victims that time when four men used bolt cutters to unlock the gates and then reversed into the shop unit before stealing chainsaws and hedge trimmers.

I guess break-ins at dealerships and indeed from groundscare teams, are not a new thing. Depressingly, in the 16 years I've worked on these magazines these stories have always cropped up.

But why?

Do thieves see machinery dealerships and equipment storerooms as soft targets? If so, what can be done to make them a much less enticing prospect?

Once a machine is in the hands of a criminal, one would presume they are not intending to cut the grass or fell trees with them? They are to be sold on. Therefore how can this be made more difficult?

Schemes like the CESAR data-tagging of machinery so they can be tracked and identified must help. Polaris for example recently announced that all their utility vehicles will now be part of this initiative. Beyond that I suppose it’s a wider attitude shifting? 

Turf Professionals are fully aware of the myriad of reasons not to buy machinery offered on the black-market, so it’s emphasising that message to the wider public which may help discourage a market for stolen equipment?

Any ideas or measures you’ve taken to protect your equipment from theft which you’d like to share, please feel free to leave a comment under this article.