Farming - kerfuffle

[Solomotree]

interesting how Jeremy Clarkson, one of the biggest vocal opponents of the inheritance tax on farms, literally boasted that he bought the farm to avoid paying it. It’s people like this we need to clamp down on and where people’s ire should be directed. And the vast vast majority of farms will not be affected.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/01/farmers-shocked-budget-inheritance-tax-estates

I’m shocked at some of the contempt and mockery for farmers on this thread.

I’m a city person with lots of allergies, not particularly keen on all the hard work and messiness of farming. No romanticising farming here! And I can imagine farmers themselves are as annoying by the tax dodgers buying up farmland, as anyone else. It irks me too.

But, at the end of the day, I like to eat. And, I’m grateful for the high quality food others’ toil and skill has created.

We need to get back to a place where we respect one another’s contributions. Whether its a nurse, a farmer, a customer service rep, a teacher, a clerk, a lifeguard or a mid-level manager doing corporate drudgery.

I've heard farmers say he's done a lot of good.

We've done nothing, we've meetings coming up with the solicitors where it will be explained to us. I think it's the inevitable increase in value of the properties, hence them being revalued.

Doesn’t matter how much the properties have increased by. If they’ve been in trust for years there is no tax just because they’ve gone up in value. If your ten year charge is after April 2026 then you’ll have an up to 3% charge on the ten year anniversary and you’ll need a valuation for this - but there’s no other grounds for a tax charge.

You might need a tax adviser not a solicitor.

I can’t pretend to understand much about farming although I live semi-rurally so lots of smaller farms around me.

However @Solomotree i think your description of Jeremy Clarkson is spot on. He has the cheek to present himself as fighting for farmers, whilst having openly said he bought his farm as an inheritance tax avoidance measure. You can’t expect to exploit these loopholes when it suits you, and cry foul when the Government closes the said loophole.

it the actions of people like this that have now put smaller family farms in a difficult position I think. Of course, they also don’t have Netflix contracts paying them handsomely to watch them farming.

He is a hypocritical twat and should be ashamed of himself.

Thank you. Both are attending the meeting. The bloody thing took two years to set up, with HMRC querying everything.

So I guess if farms were set up as trusts there would be the hassle to set up the trust, then again ten years later. Sheesh. We have to find the money I guess sigh ..

Actually he has fought for farming in the past. His high profile through Amazon has been a help.

Clarkson s clause had come into effect this year

"‘Clarkson's clause’ introduced to cut red tape for farmers | LocalGov" https://www.localgov.co.uk/Clarksons-clause-introduced-to-cut-red-tape-for-farmers-/60453

Lots of suggestions on here that farming is different, can only be learned by spending your childhood on a farm, nobody else is prepared to do this work etc

1. that’s just not true, I know of several successful farms run by first generation farmers, and often they are the ones introducing new approaches and embracing restorative techniques
2. lots of kids who grow up rurally (because they are the ones who see farmers working)would love to farm, but have no chance of ever affording a farm.

In my opinion, farmland should have a much lower market value to reflect how much income it can actually generate. This is why the suggestion upthread of extra capital gains tax, plus stronger planning laws to prevent change of use would be helpful. It would reduce demand for investment/speculation and hold down the values making IHT more reasonable. What it wouldn’t do, is make inheritors wealthy if they chose to leave farming, but they would be able to make that choice

Farmings different because no other business model requires such high capital investment for such little reward. On paper it makes absolutely no sense. But it's so essential for food production and security.
A tractor costs best part of half a million a combine harvester 750k! A plough another 100k. Drill another couple of hundred grand.

And everything is at risk including the family home.
Farming doesn't make money. Farmers don't set the prices for what they produce. Farmers do it because they were under the impression that eventually they would inherit and be able to pass it on to the next generation.

I think what he’s done is show people the actual economics of farming and how it’s really hard to actually make money in an entertaining and accessible way. The number of people who had the slightest interest in or knowledge of farming has probably increased by about 100x.

It doesn't matter if he bought the land for inheritance tax purposes or not. It really doesn't. The important thing is that the farm is farmed.

Clarkson has successfully made the point numerous times that his farm makes absolutely no money. The country needs people to continue to buy land and keep it in production. Large land owners who let their farms out often do so at very reasonable rents on long leases because they don't need the land to make them money. It just saves them tax in the long run. This helps farmers without large amounts of capital to get in farming. Crucially it keeps the land In food production.
The country needs tenant farmers as much as it needs family farms. The system needs all the components to work.

We stopped watching country file years ago because it became irrelevant, patronising and cast farmers in a bad light a lot of the time. It has been balanced out by Amazon prime and channel 5 in recent years. I'm glad about that.

Surrounded by farmland here, growing beans for animal feed maize for bloody Digestors and fields with bugger all in them but frickin weeds ( these are apparently wildflowers) and they’re paid to bloody grow them. Not much feeding the nation round my way!

Do you have any understanding on how farming works? Or crop rotation? Nope I thought not! 🙄

Not sure if you are in a livestock or arable area of the country but this is yet another hoop farmers are now having to jump through in order to access funding. The sustainable farm incentive (SFI) has taken the place of the basic payment scheme (BPS) and actively encourages farmers to over winter a maximum of 25% of their land for bird feed in return they are paid. The rewilding rhetoric has been shoved down our throats so it seems we can’t win either way. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Land over wintered for bird feed is not allowed to be grazed by animals which happens anyway as most livestock farmers bring their animals into sheds and yards in the autumn/winter months when the ground is wet. Grass has limited (if any) growth during the winter months so it’s unusable to stock without supplementing with silage or hay so why not help out the wild birds in the winter.

Why would they want to inherit and pass onto the next generation a business that makes no money? Why do they persist with it? It makes no sense if it’s as unprofitable and hard work as you make out.

Because that is what expected in farming families.

the pay off for the hard work, little profit etc until this week was that the government left the farm assets alone so the next generation could continue to work themselves into the ground to produce food and maintain the land to pass on to the generation after them to do the same.

its guess hard to understand unless you have lived and breathed that expectation since you were born.

Land values and farming practices have changed dramatically all over Europe, only the UK has, still, these very generous IHT arrangements.

Dairy/Arable, lived on a farm, yes F&M was awful for farmers, the contractors employed to dispose of dead animal too.

But this was only changed in the nineties. Hardly generations.

Yep I do and they’ve been like that for the past three years sadly.

It’s people like this we need to clamp down on and where people’s ire should be directed.

Wrong. People's ire should be directed at the economically illiterate Rachel Reeves.

Farms were profitable in their own right leading up to that. A few years ago before covid we were still selling breeding lambs for a similar price to what they were sold for in the 80s and early 90s despite all our input costs having gone up significantly in the same time period since then.

There was more money in farm business accounts and land values and property values were far lower so the duties to pay on an average family farm were less. It was still possible and expected to hand the farm down through the generations if the next generation wanted to farm.

this has all been explained previously in this thread.

The rates pre 1992 were higher 50 to 60%, yet farms stayed in the family (in some cases)

50 or 60% tax, with no 10yr pay back period or exemptions, is still a great deal of money to find, irrespective of land values, which even now have not gone up in proportion to housing.

The farm i worked on, became unviable, 100 acres owned, 100 acres rented and the land sold to a pension company in the late 80s, the land is still extensively farmed, incorporated into larger and ever larger farms.

The loss of subsidy, which many farmers voted for, is a huge issue for farmers, as is the buying power of the supermarket.

Because it’s a way of life, it’s our home & community as well as a business.
Also a love of the countryside & outdoors. Looking after our bit of land just as generations before us did.
We are proud of the food we produce, the animals we breed.

The trouble with farming here is that you're making up to three generations homeless. Surviving grandparent, parents and adult offspring.

Yes grandad should have handed it all over sooner.

I know a family where the dad died, his two sons then ran the farm. grandad went senile, then died. He left the farm to his other son who had never been involved. Other sons wife filed for divorce claiming half the value of the farm. She got it. So grandsons and their mother and granny were made homeless. It was horrendous. The other son then committed suicide leaving granny with no children. I can't imagine the pain that family suffered. Only one DIL came out of it well financially.