To ask why you support the farmers, regarding inheritance tax?

But the reality is the purchaser of this farm is unlikely to be a farmer, more likely to be a housing or commercial developer, green energy etc who would outbid an average farming family,

Taking the land out of the food production circle for good.

We're only a small island, with a lot of mouthes to feed. And it's simply not sustainable to import all our food.

Where do live? What is your job? How are you an expert?

There are a lot of myths that farmers are wealthy. Some are, many aren’t.

there are myths that it won’t affect the small farmer. It absolutely will. Saying they can sell part of their farm to pay the tax is like say you can sell your living room. Or your liver.

Err yes it will 3 million is nothing stock ,equipment ,business and land

plenty of small frams will be affected

don’t complain when the price of food goes through the roof because of this

There are a significant number of family farms worth over 3 million.
What the civil service failed to include in the asset calculations was the value of the ‘business’ outside of the value of land and property. So….farming machinery could add up to way over 1 million quid as a half decent tractor alone is £200,000 etc.
The incompetence of the civil service with this lack of due diligence in computation is monumentally stupid! THAT is what we should also be concerned about along with food security.
Anyone remotely concerned about the cost of food, need I mention the Ukraine war and wheat prices went through the roof causing horrendous food hike prices; We need our own food supply and, like it or not, the stereo typical farmer with his big Range Rover, we need those people. To add, having read a quite a bit about Rachel Reeves I believe she has a deep rooted envy with anyone who has made any wealth, very very nasty quality to have.

I don’t support them, it won’t affect the small farmer.

*Just to be clear I'm not saying all farmland should be rewilded, or that its use should change, just that the suggestion that farmland can only be farmland is silly.

So when farmland is abondened it will all become wasteland is what you're saying cos sold can't be used anymore 😂 Have you heard about rewilding?

By us, very difficult to convert some farms to development …. Not all farmland is equal in this regard.

Can imagine farmer dies just chop up the pastures and sell to other farmers - so they can have extra to sell when they die.

They gifting 7 years before death is an odd solution. Your parents need to pay you market rent if they stay in a house on the farm. Starts making family situation a bit financially transactional.

Can imagine child lives on farm for free, then gets gift of farm and parent now needs to pay and is now “landlord” paying tax on the rent. Not normally how families get along.

Sorry I got over excited about talking soils and was ineloquent again.

I should have said that grassland is better because it is a more reliable lock than woodland until humans happen to it. Grassland is a more reliable carbon sink than woodland because it locks most of that below the soil, woodland locks carbon mostly above the soil and is there for more at risk from losing carbon naturally.

Yes of course woodlands are better at absorbing water than grass, I didn't say they weren't. The discssion was about ploughing up pasture for arable use not woodland. Grazed grassland still has a good use for absorbing and releasing flood water. Arable creates a more compacted soil than grazing.

Better than concrete though, you just know where this will go

its scientifically not true that open grassland is better for food protection than woodland. Land that is grazed causes soil compaction which makes it less absorbent and trees soak up thousands of litres of water and the roots build stability in the soil. Think of it logically, what’s going to use more water, trees or trampled short grass being munched on by animals?

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/673343c479e9143625613548/WAW_factsheet_Nov_24_WEB.pdf

I agree with this, may I add with my conservation hat on that in the UK pasture is a way better carbon sink than woodland. It also soaks up water to help prevent flooding and traps pollutants preventing it getting into the waterways. Pasture is a giant green sponge it is very valuable to us and nature. Plough it up and we lose it and we lose it at our peril.

Pasture soils are often much more moisture retentive than arable so less suitable for growing a wide range of food plants that need well drained soil.

Plough up pasture and we lose a really valuable eco resource, we don't easily get that back. We are still living with the dreadful conservation issues of ripping out the hedgerows in the 1970s despite replanting some in the 1990s. Our song bird populations have never recovered. We lose too much when we fuck about like this on some experimental drive we already know will damage something, somewhere sometimes even miles sway

Tbh, our farming ancestors have discovered the most suitable agricultural use for the various soils, microclimates, and proximity to other natural resources. Why do we keep insisting they got it wrong and we know better. We don't, they nailed it.

cows don’t just eat grass. We grow a huge amount of food just to feed them. Without cows we could use those fields to grow food for humans. So even if the only option for cow fields would be re-wilding we’d be better off.

not to mention a forest is a much better flood defence then a field full of cows.

Not a lot of grassland/meadow is suitable for arable, that which is, has crop rotation on it - hence cows. And you will be destroying the eco-system, and the habitat of many wild creatures. Not to mention making the landscape of Europe less functional, because it has been set to animal husbandry/arable for thousands of years and is at its most productive as it is. You could also be looking at increases in flooding etc, from change of land use as when forestry is cut down, or houses built near a flood plane (you don't have to damage the flood plane to re-direct where flood water goes).

I know you were. I was just asking what you thought would happen if, as some want, demand for meat and dairy products falls. And I explained, too. Do keep up!😂

But they can sell the farm can’t they? The farms must be worth a load of money.

Apart from throwing out the baby with the bathwater, looking at one example of this apparently filthy bathwater so to speak, James Dyson, it is hard to understand the bitterness shown over possibly missing out on yet more if his money - the part remaining to him after all the massive amounts of tax he will already have paid during his lifetime.

Sir James Dyson and family, whose Dyson campus is located in Malmesbury, came in at number six on the national publication’s list of the top 100 taxpayers in the country for 2024.
Over the last year, the 76-year-old contributed a whopping £156 million to HM Treasury.
This was up from £93 million the previous year, when he came in at 12th on an annual list that is now in its sixth year.

https://www.salisburyjournal.co.uk/news/24081603.sunday-times-tax-list-2024-james-dyson-one-highest-taxpayers/

Then he has 3,500 employees who will be paying U.K. tax, and his company will be paying more tax for them.

His inventive talent was a gift to the country.

Where is this bitter sense of being somehow cheated by Dyson coming from?

He could just leave, or shut-down and leave us to it.

Genuine farmers yes, land grabbing tax dodgers (Jeremy Clarkson et al) absolutely not. Rich people having financial advisors caused this.

Farmers can't set their own prices because the access to market is very restricted. The vast majority of farmers sell to a miniscule group of very large businesses through a middle man group. So the retailers set the price they will buy for not the producer, there is very little negotiating power for individual businesses.

Then when it gets to harvest those buyers know full well that the farmer has a perishable product so some more negotiations can go on because the shelf life of fresh food is very low.

In dairy there is usually only a couple of dairy companies that will buy the milk so again, stifled on access to a market. During covid and still some now found that as they were closer to higher populated areas and urban centres they could put in milk vending machine or sell through a hut with a good fridge and sell at the farm gate, some are still doing that partly because there is a demand in their area and partly to spread the risk of having all your eggs in one market basket. Doesn't work everywhere though, it works better where more potential customers live.

Better access to alternative markets and the ability to process food on farm could improve things for a lot of SMEs who don't have the space for appropriate storage

This

@MarkingBad What is the reason Farmers don't say I will only sell my produce at 'x' price? If it is because another Farmer will come along and undercut him, then that still makes the farming community responsible.

Yes and without subsidies, grants and funds too, totally agree.

If agriculture was set up like any other business that would be fine

It isn't like any other industry but I'm not against there being changes so farmers have better control of their profit margins and being in a better negotiating position to achieve that. But they aren't and no one is doing anything about that who has any power to change anything. It doesn't mean to say they are all making a loss though, breaking even, small profit margins, just not enough for reinvestment or paying whacking great bills that is supposedly designed to stop another section of society avoiding tax.

But this IHT doesn't make this particular tax avoidance scheme unattractive to private investors so it just harms rural SMEs across the board and reduces food security.

Too much ire and ill will against farming and no where near enough against the very people who caused this to happen.

Always the way.

🤣 I don’t understand

OK some land may be unsuitable for arable and only suitable for sheep. But by and large cattle, especially dairy, are grazed on land that could be repurposed for arable.

In reality in terms of produce, dairy is not a great use of land. More sustenance can be produced per acre through arable.