Trying to do the right thing: focus on food production in a healthy natural environment. Oxfordshire. Ex @WiltonPark bringing people together for dialogue. OBE
Oxfordshire
Joined August 2013
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Robin Hart retweeted
Autumn Budget came and went. Family farm tax still stands.
NFU: “Food security is national security” now feels like a hollow promise.
Farmers who’ve just had one of the worst harvests in years are being told to absorb higher tax, high input costs and oversubscribed schemes.
Where is the support that was promised?
Robin Hart retweeted
Food production ceasing in the bread basket of England to be replaced by sugar grown on land from the Amazon’s cleared rainforests using chemicals banned here.
What on earth are we doing as a nation?
@DefraGovUK
Robin Hart retweeted
Imported produce should be required to meet the same standards as produce made domestically.
Robin Hart retweeted
Kaleb Cooper, the farm manager on Clarkson's Farm, worked out his own hourly rate from the farming side of his business and it came to fifty pence. He said so on a podcast. His books pay rather better.
Kaleb is not a television character. He is a working contractor who was farming in the Cotswolds before the cameras came and will be when they go, and he has done the sums that most farmers do in their heads and keep to themselves.
- Hourly rate from farming, by his own count: 50p.
- Hourly rate for the woman who stacks the shelf his wheat ends up on as a loaf: at least £12.71.
- Price of the loaf: about £1.40.
- What the wheat in it earns the farmer: about 10p.
- The farmer's profit on it, measured in 2022: 0.09p.
The whole chain is paid before the man who grew the thing. The supermarket takes its margin, the miller his, the baker his, the haulier his, the fertiliser company its, and what is left when the harvest has been through all of those hands is the farmer's. His share has been shrinking for decades, because he is the only link who cannot pass the cost on. He cannot hold out for a better price for long either. The seed, the fertiliser and the diesel were paid for months before harvest, and grain costs money every week it sits in the shed.
Selling direct is the one place it is different. A farmer who sells off his own farm, through his own shop, to a customer who drove there, keeps far more of the price. That is why Diddly Squat had queues out onto the road, while Clarkson's first year of actually farming the place made him a profit of £144.
Kaleb is in his twenties and has three children and is one of the best farmers in Oxfordshire, and his trade pays him about a 25th of the legal minimum wage. The country wants its food cheap, and it has got exactly that.
Robin Hart retweeted
It has made the Government’s current warning seem tone death and senseless.
And what is absurd is watching the same state systematically weaken the domestic producers who actually grow and process the food that would make the country more resilient in the first place, while imports fill the gap and rural businesses fold.
You cannot talk seriously about national resilience and food security while watching the infrastructure that produces British food shrink year after year. The contradiction is obvious.
Robin Hart retweeted
Labour’s partial climbdown on the family farm tax wasn’t enough. Many ordinary farms remain exposed once land, buildings and equipment are valued. Conservatives have said they will axe both the family farm and family business taxes in full and simplify the bureaucracy that currently ties farmers up in forms instead of production. Rural Britain is watching the next Budget.
Robin Hart retweeted
Farmland that has fed UK nationals for generations ought to be protected from sale to foreign entities.
Robin Hart retweeted
Only 5% of farmers optimistic Britain can secure its own food supply.
40% are wondering if they’ll still be farming in ten years. That should scare us all.
Food security is national security!
Robin Hart retweeted
UK agriculture manages 69% of the land and still only gets treated like a rounding error in the economy.
446,000 people. Real food. Real weather risk. Real thin margins.
Supermarkets take the margin. Farmers take the drought.
Cut legislative overreach and empower our agricultural economy!🇬🇧
Robin Hart retweeted
Invest in the future health of your children, do not rely on any institution to teach them what food is and where it comes from.
Explain to them the benefits of locally sourced whole-foods and how they originate.
🌍🌎🌏
Robin Hart retweeted
If only the Government had been warned about this. Repeatedly. From the moment they announced the changes to APR/BPR.
The best thing the Chancellor could do to reset their disastrous rural record is show they’ve listened and later this month abolish the changes to IHT.
Robin Hart retweeted
🚜 This is what a tax against growth looks like.
A @CLAtweets survey of 700 rural family businesses found:
🚜 89% have paused investment
🚜 64% of those cancelling projects have abandoned plans worth more than £50,000
🚜 More than a third have withheld over £150,000
🚜 85% say the £2.5 million allowance does not cover their business
🚜 Almost half expect to sell at least a quarter of their land
🚜 70% fear their business will not survive another decade
These are not passive assets sitting in a bank account. They are working farms: asset rich but often desperately cash poor.
Farmers are cancelling machinery purchases, holiday accommodation, solar panels, crop production and reservoirs desperately needed to withstand drought. Some are even allowing buildings and land to deteriorate because the Government has created a financial incentive to prevent their businesses increasing in value.
Hannah Darby’s family has shelved a £200,000 holiday let conversion and a 16kW solar installation. An inheritance tax bill approaching £500,000 could force them to sell land and leave their farm unviable.
The entire APR/BPR reform is forecast to raise only about £295 million a year by 2030–31. Yet it is already freezing private investment, weakening food production, obstructing renewable energy and destroying confidence throughout the rural economy.
The Government’s impact assessment claimed the policy would have no significant macroeconomic effect. The real economy is now delivering its verdict.
If @andyburnham and @JohnHealey_MP genuinely want growth in every postcode, they must reverse this self defeating tax in the autumn Budget.
You cannot tax working family farms into shrinking and call it economic growth.
Robin Hart retweeted
Nine in ten farmers have halted investment because of Labour's family farm tax.
That's from a @CLAtweets poll of 700 farmers, in the Times today.
Burnham says he wants growth in every postcode. There will be no growth in farming while this tax stays. This proves the opposite, the industry is shrinking and it's being pushed to the point where it could be destroyed altogether.
No farmer feels they own their land. We are custodians, looking after it for the next generation.
So how can anyone think it's reasonable, or even possible, to tax that handover as if it were wealth?
Until this is sorted, nothing else Labour announces for farming will make any difference whatsoever.
@reformparty_uk will scrap the family farm tax.
thetimes.com/uk/environment/…
Robin Hart retweeted
The millionaire farmer is the only millionaire in Britain who cannot spend a penny of it.
On paper, he is a millionaire. He drives a pickup older than his grandson.
On paper, he is a millionaire. His last holiday was a funeral in Cumbria.
On paper, he is a millionaire. His wife has done the books for 30 years and never drawn a wage.
On paper, he is a millionaire. He calved two heifers last night by torchlight.
On paper, he is a millionaire. The government's own survey puts his return on all of it at half a percent a year.
On paper, he is a millionaire. The only way to touch a penny is to sell a field, and the farm is smaller forever.
Every other millionaire can sell a slice and go on holiday.
He sells a slice and next year's milk cheque is smaller.
Since April, everything above £2.5 million each is taxed at 20% the day he dies, on a number he never once got to spend.
The land is the millionaire. The farmer just works for it.
Robin Hart retweeted
British beef, British lamb, British grain. After a harvest like this one, the least we can do is buy what’s grown here. 100% British still matters. 🥩🇬🇧
Robin Hart retweeted
Farms are holding back on reservoirs and other resilience work because it would push the value over the inheritance tax threshold. That’s not planning for the next generation – that’s being forced to choose between the farm surviving the drought or surviving the tax. Scrap the family farm tax in the Budget. In fact, scrap inheritance tax for all.
Robin Hart retweeted
British farmers don’t just grow food. They keep the lights on in the countryside, hold 70% of the land together, and put about 65% of what’s on our plates there in the first place.
World-leading welfare. Traceable food. Shorter miles. Rural jobs. Landscapes that don’t look after themselves.
Cheap imports don’t carry those costs - or those standards. If you want British food to stay British, buy it, ask for it, and back the people who produce it.
Look for the flag. Look for the Red Tractor. Back British farming.
🇬🇧
Robin Hart retweeted
‘It is madness for Whitehall to be prioritising conversion of farmland to solar panels.’ ☀️❌
Around 12,000 acres across West and South Norfolk could be covered by major solar proposals, the equivalent of 250 Wembley Stadiums.
MP George Freeman says panels should go on car parks, supermarkets, schools and hospitals first.
Can solar development take place without impacting British farming?
READ MORE: ow.ly/8VPL50ZN9wn
Robin Hart retweeted
(2/4) The PM @andyburnham joined dozens of other MPs in celebrating BBF Day. We were pleased to hear his pledge that his government will back British Farming and that he believes food security is national security.
Robin Hart retweeted
The average British livestock farmer is a millionaire who cannot afford a new pickup, and both halves of that sentence are true at the same time.
The charge, as the Treasury puts it: farmers are asset-rich, sitting on land worth millions, and asking to pass it on untaxed while everyone else pays. Rachel Reeves announced the cap from the despatch box on 30 October 2024 and has called it fairness ever since.
The millions are real. Pasture in England sold for eight thousand six hundred pounds an acre in the first half of this year. Three hundred acres of grass is two and a half million pounds. That is the number the Treasury taxes at twenty per cent above the threshold from this April, and not one pound of it was set by anything the farmer grows. It was set by solar developers, forestry buyers and rollover money that has never wanted a lamb.
Now the income off those three hundred acres. Defra's own average for a lowland grazing farm in 2024/25 was twenty-eight thousand pounds, and the figure is called Farm Business Income, which is the return to every unpaid person on the farm, the farmer, the spouse, the son who does the fencing, and to all the capital tied up in the land, before anyone draws a wage. It also includes the environmental payments. Twenty-eight thousand pounds, for a family, for a year, for owning two and a half million pounds of grass.
A house is wealth because you can sell it and still have somewhere to live. The land is the tool. Sell the tool and the income stops, and the tool is the only thing on the balance sheet that would cover the bill.
So yes, a millionaire. The kind who works Christmas Day and drives a truck with a door held on by a strap.
The nurse gets a salary and a pension. The farmer gets a valuation.
