When Sam Krautscheid raised a pistol to freeze two thieves, he was aiming at an epidemic of agriculture crime. In an era of heavy drug addiction and minimal prosecutions, farms are the soft underbelly of rural crime, and the crisis is deepening.
Growing crops in Grant County, Washington, one of America’s hottest ag crime zones, Krautscheid faces an onslaught of outlaws steadily stealing and destroying equipment. Losses to theft have become part and parcel of agriculture—a standard business consideration.
“Defend your farm or lose everything,” he says. “This is only getting worse and everyone knows it.”
Picking the Wrong Farmer
On Sept. 9, 2023, roughly 12 miles from the Columbia River, on the eastern side of the Cascade Curtain, Krautscheid finished baling hay, piled three sons into his pickup, and rumbled toward town for a meal and a country music concert. It was a hair before 7 p.m., at the tailend of a summer filled with repeated 911 calls by Krautscheid to report stolen goods.
Less than a mile from his home, at the crossing of two major highways, Krautscheid approached a gravel lot containing multiple farm-related utility buildings: storage shed, three double-wide trailers, and a house—all vacant.
A four-door sedan, parked beside the main shed, caught Krautscheid’s eye. “No. Shouldn’t have been there.”
He pulled over, reached for a Kimber .45, and exited the truck, ordering his three boys to remain with the vehicle. He walked to the car, peered in the windows, and observed the backseat odds-and-ends of burglary: massage table, gas cans, weed whacker. Immediately, Krautscheid called the police, reporting a likely theft in progress.
As Krautscheid neared the building, pistol drawn, an arm wrapped around the corner. He barked an order as two thieves came into plain view. “Get down. Get on the ground and don’t come any closer. I don’t want to shoot, but I will shoot.”
Thief No. 1, closest to Krautscheid, folded. Thief No. 2 advanced, armed with a billy club—a weapon of attack and certainly not a pry tool for larceny. “I didn’t know what kind of drugs were affecting him, and it took me yelling out several times for him to stop and realize I was armed.”
“I kept backing up to make sure he couldn’t close the distance,” Krautscheid continues. “I was not gonna let him around the corner at all because my boys were at the pickup.”
Krautscheid held the men, Glenn Richard, 45, and Jesus Rangel, 28, until police arrived. Both already were on a revolving door policy with law enforcement and the courts. Richard had 37 failures-to-appear; Rangel had 17 failures-to-appear.
“One guy got sentenced to zero jail time,” Krautscheid recalls. “The other guy with the billy club got 12 months of time and 12 months of community custody.”
“In so many terrible ways, that was just a normal day on the farm for us. It’s a snapshot of how bad crime is in our state. As farmers, small business owners, and people who live and work in rural areas, we’re paying for the decisions of politicians.”
Catch and Release
Since the Richard-and-Rangel bust in 2023, the pace of Grant County ag crime has increased, Krautscheid says.
Breathtaking to the eye, his geography is home to a wide variety of crops from peas to carrots to sweet corn to potatoes to 200-bushel wheat. However, the region is parched and often receives a mere 6” of rain per year. Irrigation is a near absolute, featuring pivots laced with copper wiring running to pumps and circles.
Copper is a crime magnet, particularly amid the highest base metal prices in history. Fentanyl and methamphetamine addicts inflict tens of thousands of dollars in equipment damage to gain a few hundred dollars on a backdoor sale of stolen copper.
Approximately two-and-a-half hours east of Seattle, Krautscheid manages Hefty Seed Quincy and grows roughly 2,400 acres of crops. He describes persistent losses to drug thieves. “They strip everything. They take what they can get and leave. Whether it’s the wire between the pump and panel, or the wire to the transformers, they’ll take it all from a pivot system, depending on how much time they have.”
The theft is farm-wide, far beyond pivots. “It’s not uncommon to pull up to a tractor and find your batteries stolen. It’s one thing to steal batteries, but they cut the leads into the motors, because it’s quicker than loosening the bolts. Last winter, they busted the conduit and ripped it right out of a pump motor. They’ll take anything. We have wind machines in our orchards running off Ford V-10 motors. They’ll steal the motors out of the orchards.”
Krautscheid bleeds a bare minimum of $10,000 per year to theft and damage—far higher in some years. Extrapolating Krautscheid’s losses across grower, county, and a state with roughly 32,000 farms and ranches, the totals are staggering.
“We’re at the point where we’re blocking back roads and entrances to properties and gating and trying to find solutions to keep people from getting into these areas. But even if you catch them, or know who they are, the court system will let’em go.”
In 2024, one of Krautscheid’s county neighbors placed an air tag on a batch of copper wire that was subsequently stolen. “He tracked it to the new location immediately that morning,” Krautscheid details. “The sheriff’s office arrived and nobody got arrested because the thief claimed another guy gave him the wire. That’s what they always say, because they understand how to get off. It’s repeat crazy.”
Daily Vigil
A solution starts at the top, Krautscheid insists.
“If you steal from a store in Washington and the total is less than $700 or so, the law basically leaves you alone. Ultimately, that kind of nonsense comes right from our state politicians. They keep making the rules worse. One of the most terrible things you can be in Washington State is a property owner. People are moving away non-stop to get away from a political climate gone nuts.”
“We can’t even get a monitoring system on the criminals because it costs an outrageous $5 per day,” he adds. “How can a cell phone cost $50 per month, and a simple monitoring device cost three times that?”
Back on his farm, Krautscheid maintains a vigil. Every day.
“If I wasn’t in agriculture, I’d probably join the mass exodus of people leaving. Instead, my goal is to make Grant County a horrible place for people to do crime. We have wonderful people here, but 95% of our problems come from the few that ruin everything and threaten our livelihoods. And they’ll keep on until the day our state legislators are forced to do something.”
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
