1925

The recent announcement of changes to Inheritance Tax for family businesses have prompted much debate and protest since the budget in October. The one positive I take from it is that it has opened up more people’s eyes to how expensive it is to become a farmer, and how little you can expect to earn from it, so why do we do it?

Generational farmers have been said to be lucky to inherit wealth via a farm, and while it is a privilege to look after a farm for a generation, many farming heirs regard it as a bind to work often long hours for a low income while, on paper they are considered wealthy because farmland is so expensive.

Both of my parent’s families were farmers, and both had moved to this area of East Yorkshire in the 1960’s. My dad talked sporadically about his life growing up on the farm but it wasn’t until I began researching our family history that I started to fill the gaps in the story of how we came to be farmers.

Barmston Street, Kingston upon Hull

This year marks the centenary of our becoming a farming family, which has spanned four generations. In 1921 my dad’s father was 7 years old and the family were living on this street in the middle of the city – Husband, wife, two children & their grandfather. The husband, Richard, worked as a slaughter man for a wholesale butchers on the docks, a time when much of our food, including livestock, came into the country via the ports.

How exactly the move came about is unclear but it seems likely to have been via a contact made through Richard's work. The family moved to lodge with a single farmer, Mr Smedley, who we always knew only as ’Boss’, on the 237 acre tenanted ‘Ings Farm’, by the river. Presumably he was looking for extra help to pay his rent at the time as later that same year, after two years as a new entrant in the business, Boss was declared bankrupt. And this is how our farming journey began.

Farming in the 1920’s was incredibly tough and in 1925 the neighbouring farmer also lost his (tenanted) farm to bankruptcy, following the death of his 17 year old son in a tragic accident. In 1926 our family took over the tenancy of the 77 acres and moved next door, along with Boss, to embark upon turning the land over to dairying and rearing poultry for meat & eggs. Here they stayed, farming as a partnership, ‘Rose & Smedley’ for 41 years, by which time Richard had passed away and my Grandad, Frank took over the partnership. They worked and saved hard, no doubt off the back of those early farming years when the threat of bankruptcy was ever present. My dad, like the rest of the family, always took his tea black. This, I later learned, was because, as dairy farmers, Grandad insisted that every drop of milk must be sold and it was not to be ‘wasted’ in tea!

 Frank Rose & Boss, at Gibraltar Farm

By the late 1960’s the landlord planned to sell their farm to developers who wanted to expand the city so the remote farm was set to disappear under tarmac & concrete. Our family had to move on. In 1967, after 41 years of farming, three generations of the family, along with Boss, traveled over the Yorkshire Wolds to settle here and got their first foot on the property ladder by taking out a mortgage on a farm of 140 acres. By this point Boss (now 72) had retired so Frank formed a new business in partnership with his two eldest sons. When he retired he passed his share to his youngest son, and the three brothers farmed together in equal partnership. He died just as I was starting my farming journey, and before the mortgage on the farm was paid off.  Over those first twenty years they had set about ‘improving’ the all grassland farm and turned it over to mixed farming. By the early 1980’s they started renting, and later took out another mortgage to buy the neighbouring farm, which included an additional 90 acres.

The farm had continued throughout the 1980’s & 90’s; we were one of three families who depended upon it. With hindsight we didn’t have much money growing up but the brothers worked hard together on 240 acres (having also purchased an additional 10 acres) and we ate well from the farm & garden. My mum also worked outside of farming, from our home which was a 1930’s council house in the village, which my parents later managed to buy.

Living away from the farm, when I got into secondary school I would go with dad in the morning, feed my animals, and then cycle the two miles home to get changed and catch the school bus. The reverse happened each evening. We weren’t encouraged to be farmers by our parents and being a three way partnership there was never going to be ‘enough’ farm to go round if split between all of the six siblings & cousins. When we left school we each had to follow our own career paths, with only myself and my brother choosing to work in farming.  

 Aughton Ruddings Grange, 1977

When our family began farming land cost £30 per acre, by the time they bought their farm, 41 years later, the price had tripled to £90 per acre. I started farming when the cost was £1500 and now it stands at £8000 per acre. The value of land may have risen, but an acre is still the same size (or rather with metrication it has become 0.404686 hectares!) and farmers need more of them today than they ever have, to remain viable, so the financial value of land is more often than not a liability rather than an asset in making a living as a farmer.

Families, like land values, continue to grow over time so the assets of a family farm are diluted whenever they are shared between siblings after death. Even before inheritance tax is due, keeping a family farm together is hard work. If either one of us had wanted to continue to farm the family farm as a going concern we would need to raise £1.6m to pay our cousins to buy their share of the land alone, that’s before any buildings, machinery or stock were taken into account. Other than the farm there is no family wealth so myself and my brother chose to pool our savings & start our own farm, together.

There’s no denying that farming has changed the British landscape over the past century. Legislation passed during the Great War compelled farmers to plough up their old grasslands (today call them 'wildflower meadows') to grow more crops to feed the nation. There was a lull during the 1920’s & 30’s when imports rose again and farming was abandoned to the fate of world markets, but WWII changed all that and farmers were once again forced to plough up the meadows to produce more food for the war effort.

The UK government has steered the direction of farming for over a century

The country was determined to continue the ‘improvement’ of the land in post-war Britain with incentives to ensure that British farmers produced as much of our food as possible. In 1973 we joined the EEC and a new raft of grants then came via the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to pay farmers to do such things as remove hedgerows & fill in ponds to make farming more productive. Hedgerow removal grants ceased in 1976, except when associated with drainage schemes which continued until 1983. Two years later funding was introduced for hedge reinstatement & restoration.

Some hedgerows were removed and many ponds were filled in on the family farm but I remember asking my dad, as I stood beside him on the combine in the 1980’s, why he didn’t buy a bigger combine like everyone else seemed to be doing at the time. His answer was that the little machine could pass through the narrow gateways and move between fields easily without wasting time removing the header!

My dad driving the combine, mid 1990's

The family gave up dairying after my dad’s brother died in 2004, when the decision was taken to sell the original farmstead, along with some five acres of land, in order to raise the funds needed for my uncle’s family to inherit his estate in cash, yet continue to farm. It is common for farms to be broken up in this way, with record house prices the farmhouse, and it’s associated buildings are often the single most valuable asset to sell when cash is required.

The neighbouring farm had also been split from the land in the late 90’s and sold to a non-farming family who let us overwinter our small but growing herd in a redundant farm building for several years. A small patch of land then came up for sale in 2002 and here we were able to buy it & establish a permanent base from which to trade. The farm is far from a viable size on it’s own so we now focus on conservation grazing nature reserves and semi-natural farmed habitats that have likewise been split from their adjoining holdings and become fragmented through efforts to protect them against farm intensification, for nature.

Today  we manage 500 acres in total – a farm of this size would cost £4m just to buy, so we could never raise that sum from farming the land but we do try to earn a living by selling produce direct via our website, Rosewood.Farm

Establishing a new farm in the early 2000’s without outside capital was really hard going. I can  certainly relate to how difficult it must have been for my great grandad to start farming in the 1920’s. We just caught the tail end of production subsidies, which had supported farming (in our case, beef production) to keep producing food, even when it didn’t make financial sense to do so, for the best part of a century. The EU, under the CAP, replaced these with a new flat rate payment system based upon the area of land owned. This was intended to support farming while not subsiding any particular class of crops or livestock. The new system was  phased in over seven years but because of the way the transition between the two schemes was made we missed out on the ‘historic’ element and just 10% of the new flat rate in exchange for basic environmental compliance on the farm, which amounted to just £270.

Flat rate payments continued for agricultural land until Britain left the EU, following the 2016 referendum. This has meant that the UK is now free from the constraints of the CAP and can set it’s own agricultural budget and objectives. The plan from the British government at the time was that the flat rate payments for owning land would cease and be replaced by payments for ‘Public Goods’, ie those essential elements of our natural environment that the market does not pay for. The old payments were ‘delinked’ from the land and reduced over four years to allow farmers to plan & adjust to the system of public goods payment. There was to be a gradual reduction in delinked payments over four years, with the last payments made in 2027. The first payment, made in 2024, was to be cut by 50% to fund the ELM schemes.

The herd conservation grazes Yorkshire's nature reserves in summer

As conservation graziers this change of direction offered us hope that services such as ours might be supported. Unfortunately and to this day there is still no help to support us in grazing nature reserves. However something we had been calling for; stand alone capital grants, had been introduced by the government to aid environmental protection & nature enhancement work on farms in addition to an improved version of the Sustainable Farming Incentive for our farm. After years of uncertainty, finally, things had started look up.

We had always used the old annual payment to make improvements to our system, treating them as an investment in the future of farming. The new grants wouldn’t help us with the things we really need – extra funding to make grazing the nature reserves easier, or in buildings to house cattle over the winter. We must remain profitable from selling beef to continue this work, but the grants were a step in the right direction for farming. Capital grants offered help towards such tasks as planting new hedgerows and restoring old ones, without locking our small farm into a restrictive agreement that would limit our ability to use the land as a support to grazing the nature reserves.