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The Common Sense has done extensive comparative research into attacks on farms and farmers compared to attacks on South Africans more broadly. The purpose of the research was to determine whether the extent and rate of such attacks were similar to the general population, or whether there were differences in the rates at which farmers were attacked compared to the rates of attack on the broader population.

To do this, The Common Sense took South African Police Service (SAPS) data on armed house and business robberies for the national population and compared it to the data on farm attacks. These armed robberies were chosen because they closely approximate the kinds of attacks that farmers suffer on their homes and businesses.

The Common Sense also took SAPS data on the number of murders committed during house and business robberies for the national population and compared that to the number of murders committed during farm attacks. The data was drawn from the past five years and then averaged accordingly.

From these data The Common Sense calculated three things.

The first was the attack ratio. This measured how much more likely a farm is to be attacked than a house or business elsewhere in the country is to suffer an armed robbery. This was done by comparing the rate of attacks on farms to the rate of armed robberies on homes and businesses for the national population. It was worked out on a per 100 000 household basis, meaning that the figures are directly comparable, and that the fact that there are substantially more non-farming households than farming households does not matter.

On this calculation, The Common Sense estimated that farming households were between 1.47 and 2.94 times more likely to be attacked in their homes and businesses than is the case for the rest of the South African population. The reason for the spread is that there is uncertainty about the number of farming households in the country. The lower figure of 1.47 assumed a high number of farming households. The higher figure of 2.94 assumed a lower number of farming households, and likely a more realistic number. The midpoint between those two figures was 1.96, which would mean that farming households are roughly twice as likely to be attacked as the balance of the population.

The data are set out in the chart below.

The second thing The Common Sense calculated was the attack lethality ratio. This measured how much more likely a farm attack is to culminate in a murder than is the case for an armed house or business robbery. This was done by comparing the share of attacks that end in murder on farms to the share of armed robberies on homes and businesses that end in murder. The figure here is that attacks on farms are 6.72 times more likely to end in murder than is the case for a house or business robbery.

The third thing The Common Sense did was to calculate an index of the relative degree of danger faced by South Africans and farmers alike of being attacked and killed in their homes and businesses – or what this newspaper is calling the Attack Lethality Index Score, or the ALIS. This was done by weighing attack rates against the murder rates per attack. The data was then weighted to sit on an index. The index can be calculated for anywhere in the world that has data on violent home and business invasion robberies and killings committed during those crimes.

For example, to develop a sense of where South Africa stands relative to the world, The Common Sense estimated the figure for the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US) in addition to those for South Africa as a whole, and then those specifically for farmers. The index was weighted so that the score for South Africa as a whole was set at 100, and the other scores were calculated relative to that. The result was that the UK has a score of under 1 – in other words a relatively very low risk of its citizens being violently attacked and then also murdered in their homes or businesses. The score for the US was 24 – in other words, a very much higher score than the UK, but still somewhat lower than that for South Africa. The score for South Africa's farmers was calculated at 1 253 – in other words very much higher than that for the population as a whole. These data are set out on the chart below.

A very important point to stress is that in the course of this work The Common Sense adjusted various of its assumptions behind the estimates upwards and downwards. But even at the extremes of these adjustments - the share of national robbery-murders attributed to home invasions, the number of farming units, UK home-invasion robbery-murders, and the lethality rate of US robberies, each pushed to their upper or lower bound - the broader conclusion of the analysis remained unchanged: South Africans are substantially more likely to be attacked and killed in their homes and businesses than is the case for people in the rest of the world, and farmers are substantially more likely to be attacked than is the case for South Africans as a whole. That is the thesis that The Common Sense sought to test, and the exact degree to which it is true is less important to the indisputable fact that it is true to an extreme degree.

A second important point to stress, given the tenor of the debate around farm killings in the country, is that the risk faced by commercial farmers is elevated regardless of their race. It is this newspaper's estimation that black commercial farmers are at grave risk of being attacked and killed on their farms, as are their white compatriots, and that it is wrong to think that the risk of farm killings attaches to white commercial farmers alone.