Multi Millionaires Complaining Again

Of course I believe the no farmers, no local food. If a farm is sold to a property developer, no food will be produced there.

You can argue anything you want. You aren't interested in the reality and you don't know anything about farming.

Of course the land disappears - it disappears under a shit tonne of new housing!!!!!!!!!!

I live in a town that is adjacent to several farms that will be hit. There are signs up saying stop the family farm tax. The local produce from these farms is sold in local shops here. I really like it - quality, freshness, health. I think that hurting farmers is crazy - especially in an age when we need food to be grown locally. We already import way too much. Farmers are asset rich but cash poor. They don't have oodles of cash to pay taxes with. I should think that faced with a tax that hurts them this much, farmers will choose to sell their farms entirely to property developers and sod off abroad with the proceeds (and good luck to them frankly). Farming is bloody hard work and I think we ought to be more grateful to the people who grow our food, rather than seeing them as cash cows.

It's typical of this current government - hurt little pockets of society. Farmers, private school parents/kids, pensioners - so that most people think "oh they can afford it, doesn't affect me, tax revenue is raised". None of this affects me directly, but it will all end up hurting me indirectly.

@ARealitycheck nah they'll have done the sensible thing and went into a more secure and less vilified sector, losing their generational farming skills and knowledge as you can't just dip in and out of farming. A fact you would appreciate if you were indeed closer to the industry.

Except those tenant farmers will be long gone as the estate will have been decimated by a huge IHT liability.

Fuck me, this is an ignorant post. Presumably it's some sort of joke or click-bait to annoy people? Too tired to play, sorry.

But we've all been shitting on farmers for years. All this righteous ire about the tax, whilst I agree is wrong, is just the final tip of the scales.

For all the comments I see on here, I wonder how many people kicking the government over this have happily accepted the pennies the supermarkets pay farmers for their produce so that we, the consumer, can pay less.

The industry has been in decline for decades. It has competition from cheaper imports, successive subsidy cuts and supermarkets paying less and less.

Whilst Labour might have delivered this particular nail in the coffin, I wonder how many realise how many subsidies the Conservatives have slashed over the years and replaced with 'stewardship' schemes that require farmers to jump through environmental hoops.

Many of our truly breadline farmers aren't out on the protest marches because they don't own the land they farm on, and have been much harder hit by the loss of direct subsidies pertaining to the practice of farming as opposed to the land it sits on.

Frankly, we needed to be giving this much of a shit much sooner than this.

And 100k presumably isn’t just pre-tax, but buying the cattle, feed, vets bills, labour costs, farm insurance, farm equipment etc - long before actually paying themselves a salary. It’s really not a lot at all.

Are you saying £100k pre tax? Doesn't sound like a lot when you have people on here saying they earn £200k working from home. And don't have to be milking early morning and evening every day of the year.

Generational farm owners being well off? A minority, maybe. The majority - bollocks.

For some farmers this will indeed be a very costly and serious business and they will not have had time to mitigate the losses. The finances of farming are such that families do have land assets but turn very small profits on the basis of these assets. Forcing them to sell will concentrate power in the hands of a smaller number of players and will reduce the number of artisan producers which in turn will reduce choice. There is much glee in the postings of the OP which does not reflect well.

Well said 👏

So over a couple of generations the farm is eroded to a size that's it's unviable?

The government have also done this
https://www.farmersguardian.com/news/4409927/mental-health-fund-scrapped-leaves-farmers-rock

And suggested they might change the gun laws to make you keep your gun at a different location to where you live (I.e the place you need it, on the farm!)

My point still stands however; cows have to be replaced (every 3 or 4 years, so 30 or 40 a year), milking equipment has to be replaced, and the return is a function of how much capital is tied up in the ‘production’ of the profit. So what level of return is acceptable to you on the capital tied up in a farm?

It’s an asset rich cash poor sector on the whole. The number of poor and average years significantly outweigh the good ones. The long term return is poor. It also tends to have a horrendous working capital cycle. It’s been propped up by land values on which banks are willing to extend facilities…If the changes in IHT result in lower land values (maybe good in the long term) there will be a number of farming businesses that will suffer a huge ‘credit crunch’ in the short term, even though they don’t need to sell land themselves, as banks reduce facilities, accelerating the concentration of land in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of increasingly wealthy people.

Be careful what you wish for has never been more apt. I’d like to think that the government carried out this analysis as part of the formulation of policy, but as has become apparent they’ve been making policy up on the hoof, so…

Except the tenant farms are often parts of much bigger farm estates and will be the bits that will be sold off to pay the taxes of the owner farmer before they have to break up the land they farm themselves. And those farms will go to rich people who don't farm or companies that want to build houses on the property. Many tenant farmers are very concerned about security of their future.

According to this report, the new government accelerated the drop in subsidies and froze a grant scheme;

Nov 2024
Grants promised to farmers in England for planting hedges and cleaning up waterways have been frozen by the government...

The news comes after Rachel Reeves’s cuts to farming subsidies were larger than expected ...

the chancellor announced a cut of 79% to these payments. Farmers were expecting a more tapered cut: the AIC data shows that, at the top end of the scale, a farmer receiving £62,000 last year was expecting £38,000 this year but would now be getting £7,200.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/26/environmental-grants-promised-to-farmers-in-england-frozen

Also, farmers can make a lot of money in the good years but we can also lose a lot of money in the bad years. I had a whopper of a year the Russia invaded Ukraine. I’m about to have a dinger of a year this year. Farmers have had a fairly good run of it for the last decade or so but the thing is, lots of them have been farmers for 40+ years and remember a decade with a fairly bad run of it. When looking at a business you can’t look at their profits for one year and think that’s normal. Also all reinvestment has to
coke from profits. Tractors and telehandlers don’t come cheap. Neither does housing a fair number of employees

No poor farmers where we are in central Scotland - well, not going by the big houses and cars......

@jasflowers
Yes I agree. When I looked on the councils development plan, there were lots of statements from Land Agents saying why this or that piece of land should be used for development. All farmland.
This was last year so well before this policy.
There are also whole fields of flowers being grown presumably as part of government stewardship scheme. I don't think you can eat flowers but the sub pays more than food.
Farmers are business people. They will do whatever makes them the most money including renting out fields for solar farms.