In the twelve months to June last year, 6,365 farms closed in Britain. The highest number since records began. For every ten that shut, fewer than six opened to replace them. In the first quarter of this year alone, 1,890 agricultural businesses ceased trading while only 805 started.
The arithmetic is extinction-grade, and it has been accelerating since October 2024, when the Chancellor announced that the full inheritance tax exemption on agricultural land was over.
From this month, a 20% tax applies to inherited farm assets above £2.5 million. That sounds like a generous threshold until you price a working farm in Hampshire or the Cotswolds or the Welsh Marches, where the land alone will clear it before you've counted a single building, a single piece of machinery, or the farmhouse the family has lived in since before the Treasury existed.
These are not cash businesses. A farm's value is in the soil; its margins are in the pennies. The average farm income in England was £25,000 last year. The tax bill on a £3.5 million estate, which is a mid-sized arable farm, not a country mansion, would be £200,000. Eight years of profit, due on death.
The only way to pay it is to sell the land, which is the business, which means there is no business, which means the farm a grandfather built and a father maintained and the son was supposed to pass to his daughter is sold to a property developer or an institutional investor from abroad who will never set foot on it.
The government says only 185 estates will be affected in the first year. Farmers say the government is lying, and given the Treasury's recent record with impact assessments, and the fact that Labour has to lie to you every day to stop its world falling apart, it is not obvious why anyone would take the government's word for it.
But even on the government's own figures: 185 families forced to break up working farms so that Rachel Reeves can close a fraction of a fraction of a deficit that was caused by spending decisions, not by farmers. It is pain inflicted for the sake of it, and thereafter only for the sake of a chickenfeed financial expropriation, and the pleasure of destroying a lineage and a chain of ownership, which I suspect is the part that Labour, who hate history and hate landowners like the jolly faithful Pabloists they are, really enjoy out of all of this.
But leaving the psychopathology of the policy aside, think of it in terms of autarchy: Britain imports 40% of its food. That number has been rising for decades and will rise faster now, because every farm that closes is acreage that does not come back.
You cannot reopen a farm the way you reopen a shop. The soil takes years. The knowledge takes a generation and, like all knowledge, is very easily lost.
The people who are being driven out are the people who know how to feed this country, and they are being driven out by people who have never, in their lives, had to produce anything more consequential than a spreadsheet.
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