‘The tractor tax means we’re sleepwalking into food shortages’

When I was growing up in rural Lincolnshire, I remember my best friend’s dad would always use a certain saying. They lived right out in the fenland – among fields carpeted with cabbage and cauliflower, and giant skies that dwarfed the flat horizon. “You can’t catch old birds with chaff,” he’d warn. The sentiment is that the wise could not be easily fooled. The chaff – worthless husks of corn – would not suffice to convince the astute of a weak idea.

The phrase has come to mind a lot recently as family farms come under threat of the newly proposed tractor tax. Since the Budget, when Labour announced that there would be a 20 per cent tax hike on inherited agricultural assets worth more than ?1m, the countryside has been alight with fury.

Keir Starmer insists that the tax is there to catch any farmers buying up land to avoid inheritance tax and no one else – that only the “wealthiest 500 estates each year with smaller farms not affected”. The birds are not convinced.

In fact, the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) have made their own estimates that appear to cast doubt over government calculations. Alongside the Liberal Democrats, they’ve found that around one-third of farms in the UK – there are around 209,000 – are worth more than ?1m, putting 70,000 at risk.

Proponents of the bill will say fair enough: why should farmers be exempt from paying the same inheritance tax as everyone else? Wealthy landowners, as we understand it, stay wealthy through avoidance; their trust fund babies are protected by law. But, this, say the farmers, is to misunderstand them and how they have been mistreated by successive governments.

Already, food production and farming – an industry worth ?120bn to the UK – has been squeezed by supermarkets and pulled apart by Brexit; the majority of farms are now operating on extremely narrow margins. The tractor tax could push farms that are already on the brink into dangerous territory and that is the message that thousands of farmers will deliver on Tuesday, as a mass protest descends on London.

“I think what a lot of people are missing is that, if we have this tax – on the cuts that we have with the subsidies, on top of the existing legislation that we have to abide by – there’s only one way for the cost of food to go, and that’s to skyrocket,” says Gareth Wyn Jones, whose family have farmed Tyn Llwyfan Farm, situated at the foothills of the Carneddau Range, for 370 years.

This is a conversation that goes far beyond taking back wealth from the land and those who run it, the effects throughout society are far more reaching, he says. “All these problems in the agricultural sector mean one thing – that poorer people will not be able to afford healthy, nutritious, seasonal food,” explains Wyn Jones. “Because we’re going to have to put that tax back on the food. There’s no other way – farmers cannot run a business at a loss.”

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Before Brexit, farmers in the UK received the same level of support as those elsewhere in Europe, via the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. It essentially gave UK farming a ?3bn boost, and enabled farmers to produce food that was cheap for consumers – but it didn’t exactly do much in the way of environmental protection. Post-Brexit, that all changed, and quite dramatically.

Since then, in place of the EU subsidies are “environmental land management schemes”, which financially reward farmers for producing “public goods” – wildlife habitats, for example. It’s an important initiative but one that, practically, laid the ground for precarity, say farmers. On top of that, higher costs, a series of broken promises and a serious shortage of workers have seen the number of farms in England decline by more than a fifth in the last decade alone.

“We’re sleepwalking into food shortages,” says Wyn Jones. “There are farms being lost here, left, right and centre – big estates being bought out by multinational corporations to plant trees so they can offset their carbon. Every inch of land we lose is one inch less to feed the nation. My belief is that national food security should be at the top of our priorities.”

Recently the idea of a land grab has been under a bit of rebranding. Now it’s not just aristocracy, but celebrities who are getting a piece of the British land pie.

Last year Ed Sheeran declared he is trying to “rewild as much of the UK as possible”. But underneath the very worthy sentiments there’s a looming undertone: getting paid by the government to plant trees is not a bad deal. Though this rewilding is a worthy sentiment, for many struggling farmers it’s simply a “greenwashed land grab” – and one more barrier to affordable food production.

Some celebrities have been vocal about their feelings towards the tractor tax – notably Jeremy Clarkson, who says he’ll be attending the protest, and James Dyson, whose recent op-ed in The Times generated mixed reactions. The daily reality for the majority of asset-rich, cash-poor UK farmers couldn’t be further from that of the inventor, who now owns 36,000 acres of land across the UK.

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Unlike smaller farms, hefty landowners with plenty of cash will be left largely unscathed, says Henry Dymoke, who inherited Scrivelsby estate near Horncastle, in Lincolnshire an estate which spans over 3,000 acres. Dymoke is the 35th generation to work the land, which has been in his family since 1066. The manor holds the feudal hereditary office of the King’s Champion – his father, Francis, who died late last year, played a key role in King Charles III’s coronation.

I know the farm he now works well, or used to: my paternal grandparents once ran it on behalf of the Dymokes when I was a child. I have happy memories baked in that soil – of lambing seasons, riding out on the tractor with my grandad, Tosh, and nipping back to the farmhouse for treacle sandwiches after a busy morning chasing chickens around the yard. It also gave me a broader perspective on farming: all that back-breaking work for what seemed like comparatively little reward.

My dad eschewed farming to become a mechanic in a neighbouring town instead. I don’t blame him for changing paths: life on a farm can be lonely, and one of constant pressure. Dymoke explains that, while their land might be valuable on the surface, it is a different everyday reality. “For instance, my salary is ?24,000 per year”, he explains. “And I work a 12-day week.”

If Dymoke were to suddenly pass away, his tax bill would be ?6m under the new law which comes into effect in April 2026. To put that into another perspective, the CLA says that a 200-acre farm – that runs a profit of ?27,000 – would face a death tax bill of ?435,000.

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If spread over a period of 10 years, they say, the farm would need to allocate 159 per cent of its profit each year to simply cover the bill – or, sell off 20 per cent of their land.

“The worrying thing is that I think some farmers will [take their own lives] so their children can inherit now,” Dymoke explains. “We’ve already had two up here do that.” Farmers have three times the national rate of male suicide in the UK – Wyn Jones confirms that they’re already seeing increased rates over in Wales, too.

Wyn Jones reiterates Dymoke’s point that while “big landowners with a lot of money will find loopholes, this is going to be impacting poorer farmers within society,” he says, quite exasperated. “This is serious. The industry itself is on its knees. Keir Starmer was telling everybody how he was going to protect family farms – then he came out with the first-ever Budget with inheritance tax on agricultural land. Shame on him,” says Wyn Jones. “Shame on him.”

Their protest is in the hope that Labour withdraw the bill entirely, or, says Dymoke, amend it. “I’m not fully against the tax,” he says, “but the threshold needs to change. It’s fair enough if they want to hit [landowners] who only bought the farm for tax purposes. Or on farms that are 100 times bigger than mine, on a very different scale. Why not make the threshold ?15m?”

Time will tell if they’re successful in their plight. But if these farmers are right: if farming land in the UK continues to decline, if more food production moves abroad and leaves the public suffering food inflation, there’s only more trouble ahead. The farming community are bringing the fight to Westminster. Their message to Keir Starmer is clear: look, they’re saying. You reap what you sow.