It has more police devoted to the cause than elsewhere but the industry is being let down by its own malaise in failing to report lost cattle or call the police about suspicious behaviour.

Cattle duffing may have been around since before Harry Redford was a boy, but that does not mean rural Queenslanders should accept it as part of the risk of running a grazing operation.

According to AgForce more than $2 million worth of cattle are stolen in Queensland each year - and that's just the cattle that are reported to police.

It is believed the actual figure is far larger, but property owners often do not report the theft in the hope the cattle may have just broken a fence and will turn up again one day soon; or they do not want to disrupt neighbourly relations by reporting suspicious behaviour to the police.

But as the Stock and Rural Crime Investigation Squad says, you never know which snippet of information will unlock the puzzle to a stock theft operation - every little bit counts.

There should be no shame in reporting missing stock to the police, nor should there be a reluctance to assist police with their inquiries.

And that means keeping good records at all times of what stock are kept in which paddock, in order to provide NLIS tag numbers and cattle descriptions to the police in the event of a theft.

Those tags can then be flagged on the NLIS database, providing a ready alert for agents and police, but also providing valuable evidence if those tags are found, for example, lying on the ground in the yards of a suspected duffer's property.

But that said, the State Government needs to do its bit to ensure police have the best possible chances of successfully prosecuting their investigations.

And that means finding a prosecutor within the DPP who has a rural background, who understands the cattle industry and how the supply chain functions, and how to articulate these technical processes in relation to the law and cattle duffing practices when standing in front of a judge.

That may be easier said than done, but given the plethora of bright rural students who move to the city to pursue law degrees, it is clearly not impossible.

The resources for battling cattle duffing are at our fingertips - let's give the police the best chance of success of defeating the duffers.