"We've all seen the big-eared boys on farms"

[HauntedBungalow]

These farmer protests are a pita. Is it time to release Alan Partridge on them?

Don't be so insulting or ridiculous

So who do you think will grow your food when the farmers are bankrupt and given up? Collective or state owned farms haven’t exactly set a good example (Zimbabwé used to be the bread basket of Africa, now it’s on food aid).

Are you planning to eat insects and laboratory grown fungus? 🤢

So who do you think will grow your food when the farmers are bankrupt

It doesn't matter if they are bankrupt as that means they will have to sell off their land. Which means property developers will swoop in and build over it all. Rayner doesn't even care about our endangered wildlife. It's build, build, build and sod the future generations.

What a ridiculous, ignorant thread.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear your rural friends and neighbours trying to feed the nation on a median of about £32k pa are being so shitty. I'm assuming you are v. au fait with the industry. It's such a poor show, isn't it? (Can't believe this was posted as anything other than a joke).

Britain hasn't been self sufficient in food since rationing in WWII. This is about rich people like Andrew Lloyd Webber and James Dyson avoiding inheritance tax. Most tenant farmers will not be affected and it might allow them to buy their own farm. The tax breaks are very generous and it will affect about 500 landowners.

BTW I have never met a poor farmer who owned the land they were farming. Can we not think about the hundreds of thousands of kids who don't eat three meals a day instead?

Actually, the UK apparently stopped being self sufficient in food from around the middle of the 18th century, as I understand.

Rayner doesn't even care about our endangered wildlife. It's build, build, build and sod the future generations

Future generations need somewhere to live.

Ive no idea what "Big eared boys" means though.

Actually this is wrong. The target was probably the Dysons and Lloyd Webbers, but ordinary farmers are caught in the cross fire. I directly know several farms who will be affected, so the Labours 500 number is made up rubbish and widely disputed. A good working farm around me needs to be about 800 acres to give an income of £40k pa. The value of the land, over inflated and until now irrelevant, is about £15k per acre, making a farm around me worth about £12m. To pay the inheritance tax the farm would have to be broken up. The farmer is now rich, good for them, but the rural industry in the area is decimated. The farmers I talk to don't want to sell up and realise their farm's cash value, they just want to continue to farm, as they have for generations. Its thought of in the farming community as a land grab.
The big eared boys btw are the awkward teenage sons of the farmers, who probably work more hours than the average adult, all whilst completing their Agri college course. The grow into their ears, just like the local "road boys" on a housing estate near you.

Plenty of people are asset rich and cash poor. I don't see why farmers should be treated any differently. I care about kids who can't eat because their parents aren't paid enough.

They will be eating less soon with the price hikes needed to cover these costs. Who do you imagine will pay for it?

We can subsist on the excess ear tissue.

Don't feed the trolls.

Honestly, just ignore such facile posts and they will go away.

Couldn't agree more.

Landowners should be treated like the rest of us and pay their fair share.

This is alarmist. Plenty of people work 60+ hours a week in 3+ jobs and don't get to inherit the office building they clean.

The reasons food prices are sky high are the CAP disappearance afterBrexit, price-gouging by supermarkets and vested interests determined to recover Covid losses and then some.

It's crocodile years from the farmers and I have mo sympathy until food banks stop existing. They were unheard of for anyone except the homeless until Cameron's austerity.

Future generations need food to eat. Food is produced by farmers on farms. The countryside is a food factory. Build on agricultural land, and there will be less food to go round and what will future generations eat then?

They feed beef burgers to swans

Food prices will rise to cover it. They always do.

I live in a rural area and there are so many empty fields, I don't mean fallow but just unused, no animals or crops for years.

Spinal chord in a bap

Just big eared boys!

Someone has to own the land that is farmed. Tenanted farmers will be affected when their landowner dies and has to sell their farm to property developers to pay IHT to continue owning the other tenanted farms. 🙄

When a company owner dies it's different and this is irrelevant to farmers (but people keep bringing it up) because the limited liability works both ways and unless they were spectacularly bad at setting the company up, they don't personally pass on the assets to their family, the family will usually be company co-owners so ownership reverts to them at the point when the previous owner retires, with no IHT due because it's long before the death and is not seen as personal inheritance. Farms are, as a business model, not generally like that.

I have every respect for Farmers. If you live in the country you'll know all the work they do outside of their farm.
Don't know any poor ones though. Their kids always go to good independent schools. They're not flash, but they have money.

BTW I have never met a poor farmer who owned the land they were farming.

I have. His father took his own life recently because of his financial worries.

It's too hilly round here to grow crops, so most of the farmers are sheep or dairy farmers, and they aren't cash rich.

@PrincessAnne4Eva yep easy enough to avoid. They just don't like having the oiks at em. The outrage.