Interview by Clementine Hain-Cole, Natoora‘s Head of Education

In the Autumn Budget, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves revoked a 1992 inheritance tax exemption for farms, meaning that from April 2026, farmers will pay 20% in tax over a £1m threshold. The intended target of this change: to eliminate a tax evasion method used by the wealthy, and raise an estimated £230m in the 2026-27 financial year.

“[The government] slapped this unconsulted measure of taxation on an industry that is really really struggling to understand how it can affect the marketed price of its products that reflect the effort, input and cost of producing that particular good.”
Andrew, Northumberland

The change provoked impassioned yet diverging responses across the farming world; with some staging nationwide protests proclaiming it to be the final nail in the coffin for British farmers, whilst others backed it, proposing that the potential increase in availability of agricultural land could open up vital access for young people and put currently fallow land into sustainable production.

No matter where you stand, this is an important decision and one that stands to impact all food citizens, not just farmers. To understand better how that might be felt, we reached out to our own community, speaking to representatives of all models of farming: from first generation small-scale market gardeners to family farmers running their business across both tenanted and owned land.

What their views had in common: that this single policy change symbolises a broader, more dangerous lack of understanding and consideration for the value of farming in the UK. Read on to learn why.

IMMEDIATE REACTION

“Our farm is small. Really really small. It was bought in my father’s lifetime and it was paid for in blood, sweat, tears and with a ferocious determination. I run two businesses. I know budgets must balance. I have MS and two friends in hospital with cancer. I know the NHS needs to be paid for.

But there must be a way that avoids the suicides that will result in the next twelve months. Farming is hard enough and not profitable enough. We can’t buy our asset, even 20% of it, every generation.”
Claire, Worcestershire

Speaking to two fourth generation farmers, one in Yorkshire, one in Cambridgeshire, neither had yet done the maths on how this will affect them, but both immediately foresaw hard times and decisions ahead.

“It’s the biggest threat we’ve faced in farming. The thing that’s been giving me sleepless nights in recent times has been bird flu, but that’s been surpassed by this government.”
Charlie, Cambridgeshire

In Yorkshire, Robert’s father, who still owns the farm and mucks in to help despite being technically retired, is less concerned that their business worth will tip them over the tax threshold, but his son is adding up their assets – machinery, crops, buildings, land – and worries more about their future. To Robert, this decision by the government “makes you wonder why you do it. We’re doing it out of love, not for money. Is keeping going even possible if we have to sell some land?”

CONTEXT

“We have got into the habit of expecting our food to be cheap, and there is a cost to everything.”
Andrew, Northumberland

To understand the magnitude of Robert and Charlie’s concerns, you have to take into account that the farming landscape is as bleak as it has been in decades, with little comfort offered by successive governments of any colour. Climate change, subsidy removals following the UK’s exit from the EU, the Covid pandemic, Russia’s war with Ukraine, rising costs in production and operational materials – the odds are stacked against even the most successful of farmers.

“The last 18 months have brought the most difficult, complex farming conditions that I’ve experienced in 30 years. It has been extremely bleak; a perfect storm of financial support being taken away [EU subsidies] and the weather not allowing us to continue normal farming activities. No one has had any time to adjust to the impact or implication of that [Budget] decision. I’ll deal with that when my farm is back up and running again.”
Andrew, Northumberland

Andrew, a heritage grain farmer in Northumberland, did his farming degree back in the early 90s, when there were over 550,000 registered farms in the UK. He tells us that today’s government figures put that number at around 220,000 – “And yet, we are still required to do the same job as much bigger number of farmers of 30 years ago.”

Down on the East Sussex border, third generation apple grower John has seen orchards around him grubbed out, as rising costs and an ever-diminishing price paid for fruit push growers towards other, more lucrative uses of the land. Motivated by the government’s Sustainable Farming Incentive – the long-overdue replacement for the EU subsidy scheme – John’s neighbour has pulled out all his apple trees and replaced them with wild bird seed cultivation: worth £265 per hectare vs £65 per hectare for apples, once labour, inputs and storage are taken into consideration. A site of Britain’s heritage apple growing culture and history: erased in a single growing season.

SUPERMARKETS

“Farmers are right to be complaining but they’re protesting the wrong thing. They should be protesting against price deflation from food manufacturers – especially supermarkets – but we’ve demonstrated about that before and nothing happened because the government has turned food inflation over to the supermarkets.”
John, East Sussex

As covered in our 2024 piece marking British Apple Month, John told us that year on year devaluation of British-grown food is part of a wider systemic issue. Growers become subject to the whims of buyers, have to cover the costs of offers or wastage, and are out-priced by cheap fruit from the continent. Consumers have lost sight of the cost and value of their food: who grows it, what effort is required to produce a harvest, the culture and tradition that each variety embodies. Each Forced Yorkshire Rhubarb harvest takes two years to produce, but by the time it’s sold, the margins are so slim they barely cover the costs and labour involved – and yet growers cannot raise the prices to where they should be, because customers won’t pay them.

“What gets me is, if you go down to the farm shop people won’t pay £2 for a cauliflower, but will pay £3 for a brownie. Valuing our food is the problem, but no government cares about food education – the most they’ve done is bring in the sugar tax, and they only did that because they could make money out of it”.
Robert, Yorkshire

With Sustain’s research showing that farmers receive less than 1% of the profits for the food they produce, the greater threat to farming is perhaps not this new inheritance tax policy, but the simple fact that the next generation simply won’t want to take on their parents’ burden.

“Food has been kept artificially cheap by successive governments – which works well for inflation but squeezes pips out of farmers. DEFRA knows that there aren’t enough farmers coming up the stream and aren’t doing anything about it. Children see how hard their parents work – long hours, not well paid – and look for other careers.”
John, East Sussex

FUTURE

“I bought my farm from my father at full market value in 2013 – we’re not all sat here like landed gentry. I’m the current custodian of this small postage stamp farm so that I can pass it on to my children if they decide that farming is for them. At this moment in time I can’t encourage them.”
Charlie, Cambridgeshire

Each of the generational farmers we spoke to voiced the same concern: they could not in good faith hand over their farms to their children, knowing how little income they would make and how hard their day to day would be. Not only that, but so little value is placed on agriculture and horticulture as careers that most of the courses once offered have now closed – the leading agricultural college where Andrew studied thirty years ago is now a centre for environmental sciences, with only a tiny proportion of learning on offer to do with farming.

Which brings us to the other side of the argument put forward by some: what are the potential benefits of this decision for farming? Some argue that it could potentially lead to a redistribution of land, taking it out of the hands of those who barely care for the land and putting it back into the hands of individuals who actually want to grow food in a sustainable, resilient way. Farms that could incorporate the protection of biodiversity and ecosystem restoration as part of their practices, rather than standalone projects owned by large corporations for carbon offsetting or net gain targets. One of our market gardeners asked the question, “How can we leverage this to get new people into farming, get more land into common ownership, make it easier for young people to get started without a family farm?”

Herein lies the biggest challenge for the government: stopping land passing from wealthy individuals to wealthy corporations, and instead into the hands of the next generation of ambitious, innovative growers and farmers. Doubts are rife amongst our farming community as to the willingness and ability of any government to do that – create the right conditions and policies that support a genuine transition to a productive indigenous agricultural system – or whether this Budget simply cements their unwillingness to take responsibility for that desperately needed change. Our hope is that the debate surrounding this issue proves to be a chance for the new (ish) government to listen to farmers, uncover the real challenges facing them today, and set about repairing the damage done by decades of disinterest.

“If my wife and I die within the next five years, half the land I own would have to be sold. It won’t go back into food or farming, it’ll go into pony paddocks or wealthy city dwellers who want a piece of the country. This tax is not going to hit the intended people.”
Charlie, Cambridgeshire