‘It will change the British landscape forever’: The fight to save farming

From rising costs to geopolitical strife, farmers have suffered for some time. Now, Starmer’s tax rules represent an existential threat

Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Ashfield is one of those places politicians call “left behind”. Once a mining area, this post-industrial slice of Nottinghamshire has, like many others, had to find a new purpose since the pits closed. Walk around its towns today, and it is far from clear that this has yet been accomplished.
The tired-looking town centre of Sutton-in-Ashfield, with its boarded-up shops, suggests it is a work in progress. Locals talk of a loss of hope here; a loss of civic pride.
All around Britain’s former coalfields, once-proud mining towns and villages have their own stories to tell. There is often a sadness at the heart of them. These are places thick with memories and ghosts.
Twenty-odd miles to the north, the Miners Welfare club is among the last vestiges of pit life in the South Yorkshire village of Treeton. Sometimes old miners can still be found nursing a pint inside.
Nearby, on the site of the old Orgreave Coking Plant, sits a new-build housing estate. Its residents commute far and wide.
It is more than 40 years since the bloody clash between striking miners and police here: the so-called Battle of Orgreave, where pit-workers desperate to keep the mines open fought in vain against the onward march of history.
December 2015 saw the closure of Kellingley colliery in North Yorkshire, Britain’s last deep coal mine. But the way of life that evolved around this once-thriving industry had all but vanished long before.
Our economic geography has since been reshaped. We’ve become a country of retail parks and call centres, Amazon warehouses and coffee chains. At least in our urban conurbations.
But what of our rural areas, which have lately been thrust into the spotlight amid a row over changes to inheritance tax for farmers? This week, in the kind of scenes more often witnessed across the Channel in France, farmers descended on central London to protest against new rules in which inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1 million will be taxed at 20 per cent, where previously they were exempt.
Tom Bradshaw, the president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), spoke for many farmers when he told the crowd this change represented the “straw that broke the camel’s back”. It is a change that many will refuse to accept without a fight.
British farmers have been suffering for some time. Their woes span everything from the squeezing of margins by supermarkets, higher costs and labour shortages, to geopolitical strife and climate change.
Against this backdrop, the Government’s controversial reforms to agricultural property relief and business property relief from inheritance tax – announced in the autumn Budget and planned for April 2026 – will harm many farms, its opponents say. Precisely how many remains a vexed question. The Treasury has said it expects just 500 estates to be hit by the changes each year. The Country Land and Business Association estimates as many as 70,000 UK farms could be affected one way or another.
Either way, those lining up against the reform see it as an existential threat. “People will come to realise this is a ‘closure of the mines’ moment for UK agriculture,” Staffordshire farmer Clive Bailye, founding owner of The Farming Forum, told The Telegraph in October. “In the same way it affected those mining towns for generations, it will change rural Britain and the British landscape forever.”
Tuesday’s peaceful farmers’ rally in Westminster was perhaps no Orgreave. Jeremy Clarkson, farming’s high-profile unofficial spokesman, is no Arthur Scargill. And yet, some fear, the broader comparison may not turn out to be miles off the mark.
We chose to stop mining coal for economic reasons. For all the human pain this caused, it is now clear that, for environmental reasons, fossil fuels will play a minimal part in our future. But, as Cumbrian dairy farmer Les Armstrong says, “there’s no substitute for food”. Is there now a risk that, in years to come, we will no longer grow our own? And if so, what does this mean for our food security?
Joe Kidd, 27, comes from a farming family that can trace its roots on the land east of Penrith in Cumbria back to 1892. Kidd reckons his ancestors have lived in the area since 1207: agricultural folk, doing what Britons have done for 6,000 years.
Kidd inherited the family beef and sheep farm when his father died last year. It stretches into the distance, a vista of fields dotted with red-brick buildings, the red paint on their doors chipped. But if Kidd has children one day, he does not expect he would encourage them to pursue farming in Britain. “It’s a great shame,” he admits. “It’s a lot of work and very little financial reward. If the next generation had to pay 20 per cent [inheritance tax], they wouldn’t be left with a viable farm.”
When his grandfather farmed the land, there were six people working here. Now, Kidd works alone. “You’d have to leverage half the farm to expand.”
Even if he wished to, there’s a labour problem in farming that could make that tricky: a lack of available workers, and of young people entering the industry.
Labour shortages have been attributed to factors including the post-Brexit departure of EU workers and changes to immigration rules, as well as the perception of farming as poorly remunerated.
“There’s been such a lack of prosperity in the industry for such a long time, it’s not seen as an admirable career choice,” says Kidd. “So you’ve had a huge brain drain. You get to the point where you can’t afford to pay people what they deserve.”
Some 41 per cent of farmers have had to reduce the amount of food they produce, due to their inability to recruit enough labour, a NFU survey found last year.
This is just the start of it. While consumers have seen supermarket prices rising, farmers have not enjoyed a corresponding hike in what they receive for their produce. In 2022, food charity Sustain found that farmers were making less than a penny on the average block of cheese or loaf of bread sold in a shop. Fruit producers were making just 3p on a kilo of apples.
In September, Riverford Organic Farmers, a vegetable-box delivery firm based at a farm in Devon, launched a campaign against “farmwashing” by supermarkets. It claimed some were using farm names to give a false impression to shoppers that they were supporting British family farms. It was, they said, “misleading marketing” that “undermines real British family farmers who are struggling to survive”. At the time, the British Retail Consortium insisted that supermarkets were “always keen to promote British farming and follow the strict legislation on the labelling of food, including the use of flags”.
But the problem, suggests Armstrong, is “the supermarkets have the power”.
His farm is perched at the top of a hill, overlooking a panorama of patchwork fields. Inside one of the barns, a carousel of rotating cows are milked by metal teats.
Armstrong, 79, has a herd of 400. He does his best to cope with whatever is thrown at him. But while margins have always been tight, costs – “of machinery, labour, everything” – have risen.
Then there’s all the bureaucracy: new, time-consuming demands placed on him, often for environmental or animal welfare reasons, he says. “We have to do a lot of recording to prove we’re doing things right… As far as profitability goes, for the hours and investment we put in, it’s not a good return… You wonder, ‘Should we be trying to bring our grandchildren into this?’”
His family has been farming “since the year dot”. But things have changed, and often not for the better (though more efficient practices have been brought in). Successive governments have failed to properly appreciate farmers, he feels. “I’m old enough to remember when we were delivering the food for the nation in the first 30 years after the war, and it was marvellous,” he says. “Now a lot of farmers feel unloved.”
More recent shocks have come from events beyond the control of any one government. The war in Ukraine has pushed up prices of fertiliser, feed and energy. Data published in 2022 by AF, a farm supplies co-operative, showed a 36 per cent annual year-on-year increase in the cost of animal feed and medicine and a 134 per cent jump in the cost of fertiliser.
All of which plays out against the backdrop of global warming, and the changing weather patterns it brings. “British farming has recently been on the front line of climate change impacts,” Bradshaw said in July, responding to a report by the independent Climate Change Committee.
Ian Bowness, 52, who runs a dairy farm near Keswick at the top of the Lake District, can’t help but notice the effects of the changing weather. “In the last year, [it] has been horrendous,” he says. “There’s something very peculiar going on. It’s not what it was.”
He and his family have farmed here for more than 30 years, living in a whitewashed cottage set on 300 acres of land. In the outhouse, a crowd of young calves bleat meekly, their breath frosting in the late November chill.
The weather affects everything. The farmers need three or four dry days in a row to harvest food for the animals. They’ve been getting one or two at best. It means they don’t have the crops when they need them, and those they do are of lower quality. “When you feed it to the cows, they don’t perform, don’t produce as much milk, therefore your margin has just crashed in a lot of cases,” Bowness says.
This accumulation of difficulties is reflected in the number of farms that have vanished from the British countryside. Almost 14,500 hectares of the country’s best agricultural land has been permanently lost to development since 2010, according to research from the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The number of individual full-time farming businesses has fallen by about 10,000 in the same period, a report from the Andersons Centre found. These trends are set to continue, with the number of UK farms forecast to fall by 22 per cent by 2040, the consultancy suggests.
Our future food security is at stake. The UK is 62 per cent self-sufficient when it comes to food, according to Defra data from last year. But while this figure has remained relatively stable throughout the past decade, it masks a decline in certain sectors. Our self-sufficiency in fresh vegetables is, at 53 per cent, the lowest since records began in 1988. Only 16 per cent of the fruit we consume is grown in the UK, according to Defra figures for 2023.
“We’ve had eight or nine difficult years,” says Ali Capper, who grows apples in Worcestershire and is the executive chairman of the British Apples & Pears trade body. “Brexit has led to a lot of uncertainty around seasonal labour. Then we had Covid, then on the back of that came inflation.”
In 2022, growers were facing a 30 per cent increase in the cost of production but receiving 2 per cent back from the market, she says. “It’s been a pretty torrid period.”
Still, the apple growers’ market share was increasing: in 2012, only 17 per cent of apples in British supermarkets were grown here; by 2022, it was 32 per cent. “In September we were seeing the green shoots of recovery,” says Capper. “Then the Budget came.”
In addition to the inheritance tax change introduced by the Budget, says Capper, growers’ wage bills – which already represent 40 per cent of an apple grower’s turnover – are set to rise by about 10.5 per cent (in large part due to a hike in employers’ National Insurance).
“The combination has left growers feeling they’re being cut off at the knees.”
Even as the climate changes and other countries become unsuited to orchards, Britain will remain a good place to grow apples, says Capper. Except now there is uncertainty over how many farmers will be able to continue doing so.
The NFU has issued a stark warning about what this might mean. The changes to agricultural property relief will “snatch away much of the next generation’s ability to carry on producing British food, plan for the future and shepherd the environment,” warns Bradshaw. “If farms are being broken up and sold, British food will be hit. There is a very real threat to our long-term food security, because there is no incentive to invest for the future.” Given that it was only two months ago that Sir Keir Starmer declared that his government would “boost rural economic growth and strengthen our food security”, these warnings will embarrass the Prime Minister in the weeks and months ahead. 
There’s a threat to something else, too. Agriculture today is a far cry from the pastoral life depicted in the novels of Thomas Hardy; yet it’s still an important part not only of the British economy (contributing £13.7 billion last year) but also of something less quantifiable: some sense of ourselves as a country, and our connection to the land, dating back millennia.
Just as coal mining, for all its hardships, furnished pit villages and towns with their identity, purpose and community, so farming is more than the sum of its yield. “We do it because we love it,” says Armstrong. “ We live in the open air, in the countryside, we enjoy raising animals. We have cows born every day on our farm, and I don’t want to get too sentimental but it’s a fact.”
If this passion has kept many farmers going when the narrow margins might dictate they should pack it in, it has sustained other rural enterprises, too. Bowness’s farm has a million-pound turnover. He estimates 90 per cent of his spending is within a 20-mile radius. “And I’m no different to any other farmer,” he adds. “You use your local businesses, your local suppliers. The spread of money in a rural community from agriculture is absolutely massive, and if agriculture [comes] under pressure, the whole of the rural areas will feel it.”
If the former coalfields offer a warning, it is this: when an industry disappears, and with it a way of life, the fallout can be brutal and long drawn-out.
Some former mining areas have managed to turn themselves around: in parts of the Midlands and Yorkshire, new work has been found in warehouses. Other areas have struggled more, including parts of South Wales and Scotland, suggests Steve Fothergill, a professor at Sheffield Hallam University’s Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research.
“There are plenty of new jobs, but that’s not true everywhere,” he says. “There isn’t [today] the mass unemployment in the former mining areas that there was in the 1980s, but the longer-term impact [has been the] marginalising of large numbers of people and taking them out of the labour market.”
Levels of economic inactivity, often due to ill health, are relatively high in the former coalfields, he notes. “Thirty to 40 years on from the last wave of pit closures, yes there has been progress, but it’s uneven and it’s been a struggle. The problems haven’t disappeared.”
Certainly the fragmentation of communities has been one of them, he agrees. “We shouldn’t glorify the heyday of mining; it was hard work, damaging to people’s health and not always well paid,” he says. “But people had jobs and there was a sense of community.”
Now, the brass bands, the football teams, the miners’ welfares are mostly gone. That sense of community has, he says, “definitely frayed”.
Given the gloomy picture painted by farmers this week, is the British countryside set for a period of soul-searching akin to that seen in the former coalfields? The Government doesn’t seem to think so. In language somewhat different from Margaret Thatcher’s regarding the miners, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, and Steve Reed, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, hail farmers as “the backbone of Britain”.
Reeves and Reed are “steadfast” in their commitment to Britain’s farming industry, “because food security is national security”, they say.
They point out that they are investing £5 billion into farming over the next two years – the largest amount in the country’s history ever directed towards sustainable food production, rural economic growth and nature’s recovery.
“But with public services crumbling and a £22 billion fiscal hole that this Government inherited, we have taken difficult decisions,” they say in a joint statement. “The reforms to Agricultural Property Relief ensure that wealthier estates and the most valuable farms pay their fair share to invest in our schools and health services that farmers and families in rural communities rely on.”
Whatever happens next, it is unlikely to compare to the complete (and intentional) shutdown of the entire mining industry, Fothergill believes. Some of the farmers themselves are less optimistic. “I completely get the link [with mining],” says Kidd. “Because it is sort of the destruction of an industry… I don’t want to be defeatist about it, but I’m resigned to the fact that there probably isn’t much point in farming [now].”
If British farming does stand on the brink, Kidd has no doubts about what we risk losing. It is, he says, “the foundation of a civilisation”.
In the future, he hopes to turn some of his farm into a wildflower garden. Charging visitors to come and pick flowers would provide some extra income.
But we cannot live off wildflowers; and if Kidd feels he would be doing his future children no favours in nurturing an interest in farming, there may one day be the question of what happens to his farm.
Around the country, farmers are asking themselves similar questions. The answer will determine not only our levels of self-sufficiency in years to come, but the very character of the country we live in.
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email