While there is considerable empirical evidence that social disorganization is positively associated with crime rates in urban areas, the empirical literature on rural social disorganization and crime faces three crucial limitations: inconsistent results, reliance on official crime statistics and the failure to test the full model. We overcome the two latter limitations via the British Crime Survey. Using data from respondents living in rural areas of 318 postcode sectors, we employed weighted least squares regression to estimate the effects of (1) the exogenous sources of social disorganization on our intervening measures of community organization and (2) all variables on victimization rates. This represents the first test of the full social disorganization model in the literature on rural crime and we find very little support for it. Our results suggest a reassessment of the conclusions drawn about how social disorganization and crime are related in rural communities.