Straw and Hay Stack Arson: Getting Through Bonfire Season

There is no partial loss with a stack fire. A machinery theft leaves you with an insurance argument and a hire bill; a stack fire leaves you with a winter's forage gone in an afternoon and nothing to photograph but ash. The risk is seasonal and it is mostly deliberate. From the second half of October through to the middle of November, stacks in roadside and footpath-adjacent fields start burning, and the cause is far more often someone with a lighter than spontaneous combustion. The good news is that the window is predictable, which means it can be planned for. Last updated: October 2026. Why late October to mid-November Three things line up at once, and they are worth separating because they need different answers. The obvious one is bonfire season. Fireworks are around, and so is a general social licence for fire that does not exist in June. A stack in a field beside a village is, to a certain kind of evening, an opportunity. The second is that the clocks have gone back. Anything happening after four in the afternoon happens in the dark, in fields nobody is working any more, and the harvest traffic that gave the yard a bit of casual overlooking has stopped. We covered the wider version of this in what changes when the clocks go back. The third is simply that the stacks are there. A straw or hay stack in October is the single most valuable, most combustible and least guarded thing on most farms, and it is often sitting in the field it was baled in rather than anywhere defensible. Siting and spacing: the decision made in August Most of what determines whether you lose one stack or everything was decided when the bales were carted, which is worth saying now so it informs next year as much as this week. Get stacks away from the boundary. A stack within throwing distance of a road, a lay-by, a footpath or a pub car park is a different risk from one in the middle of a field. Distance is the single cheapest control there is, and it costs nothing but a longer draw with the telehandler. Split the stack. One large stack is one total loss. Two or three separated stacks, with a genuine gap between them rather than a token one, means an incident costs you a proportion rather than the lot. Radiant heat from a burning stack will light the next one if they are close, so the gap needs to be real. Keep stacks away from buildings, fuel and machinery. The stack itself is replaceable at a price. A stack fire that reaches a shed, a diesel tank or a parked telehandler stops being a forage problem. Leave access for a fire appliance. A gateway a tender can actually get through, and a route that does not require crossing soft ground. Worth walking before you need it. Watching a stack that is nowhere near power This is where it gets practical, because the fields stacks sit in are exactly the fields with no mains and no broadband. A camera that needs a cable is a camera you will not install on a stack. What works is a solar and 4G camera on a pole, sited to look along the approach rather than at the stack itself. That framing matters more than people expect. A camera pointed at the bales gives you a picture of bales, and then a picture of fire. A camera watching the gateway, the gap in the hedge or the track that someone has to walk up gives you a face and a direction of travel while there is still something to act on. Three things are worth getting right: Detection that triggers on a person, not a fox. Analytics that separate a human figure from an animal or moving vegetation are the difference between alerts you read and alerts you mute. A muted camera is not a camera. Night performance you have actually checked. Test it at eleven at night in November, not at four in the afternoon in October. The footage that matters will be the dark footage. An alert that reaches your phone. The value of a stack camera is almost entirely in the notification. Footage reviewed the following morning tells you what happened; an alert at nine in the evening occasionally means it does not have to. If the stack is far enough out that you want eyes across a wide area rather than one approach, a pan-and-tilt camera you can drive from your phone is worth considering, and we have gone through how that works over a remote link in the PTZ and remote viewing guide. Sizing solar for the time of year you need it A solar camera specified on summer figures will be flat in the second week of November, which is the week you wanted it. Panel and battery sizing for genuine UK winter output is its own job and we have covered it properly in solar CCTV through a UK winter. The short version: size for December, not for the day you install it. The insurance and evidence side Check the stack position against your policy before you need to. Farm policies frequently carry conditions about how and where forage is stored and how far it sits from buildings, and a stack parked somewhere convenient can quietly put you outside them. If a fire does happen, the footage is worth more than it feels like in the moment. Keep the original file rather than a phone video of a screen, note the times, and get it to the fire service and the police while it still exists on the recorder. Deliberate ignition is an offence that gets investigated when there is something to investigate, and the practical steps are the same ones we set out in getting footage the police will act on. The way cameras pay back on the claim rather than the premium is covered in do farm cameras cut your insurance. A twenty-minute job this week Walk to each stack and ask one question: could somebody reach this from a road, a verge or a footpath without being seen from anywhere? Where the answer is yes, that is the stack to put a camera on, and this is the month to do it. Then check the gaps between stacks, confirm a fire appliance could get to each one, and tell your neighbours what you have done — stack fires, like rural theft, tend to come in local runs. If you want a stack or gateway camera speccing…