2013 was a hard year to be a farmer in Missouri. Land was parched by drought, and, that summer, some farmers in Southwest Missouri started to notice some of their cattle had gone missing.
Joann Pipkin and her husband, Jim, have owned Clearwater Farm, just outside Springfield, for the past 30 years. In 2013, while working with the Joplin Stockyards, she said she attended press briefings about livestock theft.
And then her own farm got caught up in a theft ring.
“I mean, as a producer, you never think it's going to happen to you. And then when it does, it really, really forces you to open your eyes a little bit more,” she said.
The early 2010s were the start of a meteoric rise in the price of beef, and in the cost to raise cattle. Now, more than a decade later, those prices are still climbing, and Pipkin said cases of theft are all the more devastating.
“All of those kinds of things that we depend on every single day to make our living, those inputs have gone up,” she said. “And so when we see sales of livestock also increase, but maybe not quite to the point to offset some of those costs, and then a theft occurs, that just sets us back that much farther”
Willie Clack is a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa, where he’s spent the last two decades studying livestock theft. He said livestock thefts can look different in different areas of the world, but they share some similarities where motivation is concerned.
“If you look at all the research done over the world, the motivation stays exactly the same. The modus operandi is a little bit different from place to place, but the motivating factors are normally greed and financial gain.”
In early 2025, the price of beef began a steep climb, rising more than a dollar per pound on average by the start of 2026.
Paul Wells is an investigator with the Rural Crime Investigative Unit, a division of the Missouri State Highway Patrol dedicated to agricultural crimes. He said those trends in the price of agricultural commodities are reflected in the prevalence of theft on farms.
“People's willingness to take risk is directly correlated to the return that they may receive for taking that risk,” he said. “So when prices are high, there's more motivation to take increased risk, because the potential gain is much higher.”
In Missouri, livestock theft has come a long way from the state’s days as the gateway to the Wild West. Wells said today’s cattle rustling is less like cowboys and bandits, and more like sophisticated fraud.
“Just like with anything else that evolves over time, crime evolves over time too,” Wells said.
Wells said one reason financial crime has become more common is because it’s easier than trying to drive off with a trailer full of thousand-pound animals.
In one case, in early 2026, a Missouri man was arrested for his role in orchestrating a $220 million cattle fraud scheme that involved more than 2,000 ranchers and investors.
“It's hard to determine exactly why that animal is no longer where it belongs,” Wells said. “And so theft is an explanation for that and it does happen, but I don't know that we see it quite as much as we do the fraud.”
In South Africa, where Clack does his research, the government keeps track of livestock theft cases from across the country in one, comprehensive dataset. But Wells said that kind of data just doesn’t exist in America. And, because livestock crimes often cross state and county lines, Wells said many cases go unreported.
“It's a little difficult for us to get a full understanding of what the impact is around the state and even around the country… I think it's really just kind of a word of mouth game,” he said.
Joann Pipkin, the farmer from Southwest Missouri, said her family has invested more to protect the security of their cattle since that first theft a decade-and-a-half ago. Those measures — reinforced fencing, cameras, lighting — can pose significant financial burdens to farmers already struggling with higher costs, she said.
She said it’s important that farmers don’t try to combat the issue of livestock theft alone.
“As cattle producers, we need to be good neighbors,” Pipkin said. “We need to have our eyes and our ears open, not only for ourselves, but for our neighbors.”
Wells said reporting has improved for livestock thefts in recent years, partially because of involvement from the Rural Crimes Investigation Unit. But to combat theft, he said more farmers need to speak up when they see something suspicious.
