We live in what is called urban fringe which means we have the benefits of town people dumping their rubbish in our lane plus slow broadband and lousy mobile phone coverage. We're ten minutes from Luton airport and five minutes from the M1 which means that thieves can get away really easily. Everyone in our road has lost machinery from sheds, or had stuff dumped on them. From the police side we have an above average crime rate which is trending upwards and includes armed burglaries.
So we have an electric gate which stops sightseers driving in for a look around, CCTV cameras around the property and we use an alarm system. On the back of our experience I'd make some comments
1. You need an awful lot of cameras to cover fully the exterior of a house with outbuildings
2. Cheap cameras with cheap lenses give crap pictures. A fuzzy picture of a bloke in a hoodie doesn't help. Every vehicle coming on our property has its number plate filmed with a high res camera and the time logged. It's handy to know who's called or tried to enter (and we change the gate codes every few months cos lots of people get to know them)
3. Wireless systems tend to be low-resolution
4. cameras with built-in LED's work quite well at night but suffer from flare in fog or rain (or Scotland) and the heat attracts spiders who build webs across the lens at night so that the motion detection feature is triggered. Gusts of wind also trigger them.
5. The horses each have freezemarks and chips and we have signs up
There are starting to be lots of farm systems sold because farmers are huge targets for theft around here. Lots use mobile phone technology which is very cheap (if there's a signal) and can be concealed in a tree or suchlike. Some will simply take still pictures if triggered by a PIR while others will phone you if movement is detected. Position is very important: you don't need calls telling you that your sheep are walking around.
Apparently you're not supposed to film passing cars on the road outside, at least youre not supposed to be seen to do it. The main road along the far side of our property however has a pair of police ANPR cameras prominently mounted just where a vehicle would have to go to steal our livestock. We take the view that we are making it hard for the casual thief to work without being spotted, and the cautious thief will go somewhere else when he sees the hardware. But we always also make ourselves prominent with hi-viz jackets, floodlights and big torches if we suspect an intruder: we want to scare them off not catch them.
