Rising costs, climate crisis and now a new tax – who’d be a farmer?

Ted farms 800 acres of chalk-wold arable land in East Yorkshire. Until recently, he also kept beef cattle. Entrepreneurially inclined, he mostly built it up himself. His grandfather was a farm worker; his dad had a smallholding whose milk and potatoes he and Ted hawked around the local town. To buy a bigger farm in his 30s, Ted set up and worked in a taxi business and a burger bar.

He ought to be in a position to take things easier now, but he isn’t. When he steps out to take an urgent call (his wheat has beetles in it), his partner, Barbara, tells me she found him at 4.15am this morning sitting at the table, fretting. The urgent problem is the new law whereby, from March next year, farms will be liable for inheritance tax; farms like the Atkinsons’ tend to be asset rich, because of the land and machinery, but cash poor, and Ted thinks he will have to sell part of the farm to be able to pass it down to Tom.

It could be worse. Tom says his friends in farming talk about having to find different jobs. “Everyone feels stuck, because that’s what they’ve always thought they’d do,” he says. “Some people say maybe they could work in Tesco.” Ashbridge Partners, an agricultural finance consultancy, has published a survey that finds 39% of British farms will be unviable by 2031. Vince Dempsey, a semi-retired agronomist and former government farm inspector, told me he believed the new tax combined with market forces would reduce the number of farms by 50% in the next 10 years. In the sector, there is anger towards the current government, but it is also noted that successive governments have seemed indifferent to the decline. Some people now ask: what if it’s not just about a lack of interest? What if the country has decided it’s time to give up on farming altogether?

Besides the new tax, several other immediate problems have combined to make farming more difficult. Since the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, costs have increased – by up to 100% in the case of fertilisers – while market prices for food have been erratic. Post-Brexit trade deals have opened the UK market to cheaply produced food lacking the high-welfare, higher-cost European production standards UK farmers were obliged to pursue for 30 years. Global heating appears to be making the weather less predictable – too wet last year, too dry this. Chuck in the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the £70m cut in government support in the budget, low cereal prices, labour shortages, increasing rural crime, zoonotic diseases and rising use of compulsory purchase orders to obtain land for building, and you see why someone might be kept awake at night.

Still, as Ted says, this is hardly the first time we have heard about a farming crisis. A better measure might be the number of people leaving the industry. Metrics vary, but the House of Commons Library and the National Farmers’ Union agree that about 1,000 farms a year have gone under since 2019. The total number of farms in the UK now is about 100,000, down from about 190,000 in 2005, although that decline is even steeper than it appears as there is no reliable way of counting the thousands of farmers who have stepped back, paying for the seed, sprays and fertilisers but getting contractors to do the work.

I have sympathy here: I grew up on a family farm that unwillingly went out of business 20 years ago. It was small, just four fields on the edge of a village, and to keep it going my dad worked for other people, but in the 1970s and 80s it had been easier. After the second world war, when Britain had run dangerously short of food, governments provided subsidies, marketing support and advice to boost production at all costs. By 1984, the UK grew 78% of all the food eaten in the country, which of course includes things we can’t grow, such as tropical fruit. In food we could grow, such as wheat and beef, the country was 95% self-sufficient.

Younger farmers – and, this being farming, “young” means under 50 – will tell you privately that, being flattered and supported, some of that older generation fell prey to self-importance, greed and grumbling, and didn’t realise when they had it good. It’s different now; the new generation is more accustomed to the ideas of an interconnected global economy and the climate crisis, less expecting of public support, and increasingly curious about how far UK governments will give up on the idea of national food security.

Our farmers now produce just 62% of what we eat, although this is uneven. We import 84% of our fresh fruit and 47% of our vegetables, but we have a surplus of milk, grow more than 90% of the wheat, oats and barley we use, and more than 80% of beef, poultry and eggs. The big change is not necessarily about there being no British farms or home-produced food: it’s about how few farms there are, and what that might mean.

If you live in a village, you will have seen this decline in the form of farmsteads being converted to housing developments with vaguely agrarian-sounding road names. If you’re driving in the countryside, the reason you encounter more farm machinery on main roads is that the farmers who survive buy up land across wider and wider areas, and the machines needed to farm such large holdings have to be very large – too large for the narrower roads built to connect farms and villages a few hundred years ago.

The often-observed paradox is that the surviving farmers are still seen driving Land Rovers while pleading poverty. The explanation is twofold. First, it is true that some people make money; in fact, total income from farming increased between 2000 and 2024, although it remains 40% lower than its peak in 1973. In any case, it is very unevenly distributed, with a rapidly shrinking number of people making much of it.

Second, historically banks have been happy to lend money against land, so many farmers, emotionally tied to the job, keep borrowing when they’re losing money. Yes, it is profligate to lease an expensive car, but as one ex-farm worker told me, “The machinery costs so much now, hundreds of thousands of pounds, that the economics are like fantasy fucking island sometimes. The Range Rover will be the cheapest thing in the yard.” In other words, some farmers are able to live comfortably, but they are often heavily in debt – hence the nice cars and worried faces. The solution might be to sell the land and live off the proceeds as far as you could, but at that point, it becomes existential.

“With farming, it’s not like other businesses,” Ted says. “You live among it, you invest all your life into the job and the land. It’s like an investment … ” he pauses, searching for the right word, “… of your soul, if you see what I mean. You do it thinking of the generations to come after you. So it’s not just work or business, it’s your whole self.”

Molly Lewis, 21, returned to her family’s hill farm in the Elan Valley in Wales last year feeling optimistic. She had just finished her land management course at agricultural college and was keen to get stuck in to work with the beef cattle and sheep with her dad and uncle. Her father, Robert, whose family has farmed in the valley for 350 years, had come to feel pessimistic about the business; successive governments, he felt, had wanted “dog and stick” farms like theirs “phased out”. Molly, however, had new ideas – technical ideas about husbandry and grass leys, and strategic thoughts about tapping the public interest in locally reared meat (“mutton rather than lamb – we think it has much better flavour”) and renting out the carbon capture capacity of their grassland.

I met Molly while she was studying and was bowled over by her enthusiasm and determination. In the summer of 2025, the ebbing of that keenness is palpable. “Yes, I’ve changed my view,” she says, looking out one afternoon over the vast valley below the farm. “We have managed to make some changes to make farming easier since I came back, but I don’t know how long we’re going to last, really. It doesn’t seem very promising.”

She had dreamed of renting a small amount of land with her partner, for their own business, but all the costs were higher than she’d expected, and then came the news of the inheritance tax change. “Well, it’ll just knacker a lot of farms,” she says, when I ask about it. “A lot of the younger generation aren’t going to be able to afford the farm after paying inheritance tax. So everything’s uncertain now.”

The trade deals done so far, she thinks, could let in cheaper, lower-welfare meat, which might damage the sales of Welsh lamb, and would hinder any plans to sell her own directly. As for her ideas about carbon capture, she had believed farming could be remade as part of the solution to global heating, but she is beginning to think the government may have other ideas.

Agriculture is a major contributor to UK greenhouse gas emissions – though not, as is sometimes suggested, the biggest (transport is responsible for 29%, compared to farming’s 12%). The main sources of agricultural emissions are methane from the digestion processes of some livestock, particularly cattle, and nitrous oxide emissions related to fertilisers. Emissions-reduction initiatives were met with some cynicism by the older generation initially, but now they are applied to everything from feed ingredients to manure management. Emissions have been reduced by 14% since 1990.

When the UK left the EU, the old common agricultural policy subsidies – which were geared to volume of food produced – were replaced by support schemes that were essentially designed to improve the natural environment. It is worth noting that in February 2020, when such policies were being discussed in Whitehall, the economic adviser Tim Leunig made a well-publicised argument that Britain did not need an agricultural sector and could buy in its food from other countries, as Singapore did. The environmental support schemes have been reduced and have become erratic, but the greater worry is that they will become a way of eclipsing food production altogether.

“Until recently the Welsh government had a plan where they wanted all farms to turn over 10% of their land to trees,” says Molly. “I could understand the aims, but it seems strange. Where did the 10% figure come from? And not all farms have land suitable for trees. That has changed now, and you have to have 10% of your land managed for habitat, but it still feels very generalised. You hear conspiracy theories – I’m not saying I believe them – that it’s all a way of getting rid of farms. I do look at some of the plans and think there’s no farming practice involved, so you ask – what am I doing?”

Again, it sounds as if we are back in “moaning old farmer” territory – until you remember that a few weeks ago, the environment secretary Steve Reed told an audience at a farming festival in Hertfordshire that he wanted to increase food production in the most productive areas and decrease or remove it in “the least productive” places. Viewed solely in terms of the calories they provide, upland hill farms are “unproductive” because they are extensive rather than intensive. Viewed in terms of the community of the Elan Valley, they produce jobs, culture, knowledge, social cohesion, as well as wool and high-quality meat. It depends what we as consumers and a nation want – and how it is marketed to us.

The emotional appeal of British farming is not only to farmers but, as the proliferation of fake, “farm-washed” labels attests, to the public as well. In his book The Countryside Ideal, Michael Bunce made the argument that the British, as the first industrialised society, developed a strong attachment to ideas of their agricultural past. Thrown off the land by enclosures, and effectively forced into dirty cities and precarious employment, they came to cherish nostalgic images of the countryside and farms because they represented a more stable, healthier and simpler life. New printing processes ensured a ready supply of bucolic prints and books and, the argument runs, it is not really so far from those to the pictures of smiling farmers on your carrier bag.

These promise more than just a nice joint of beef or tasty carrots; there’s a sense that somewhere out there, beyond the ring road, there’s a way of living that we might still connect with through that food. An interesting question is how many farmers – and of what kind – might we need to exist to sustain that idea?

“Oh yes, people love putting your picture on things,” Anna Longthorp tells me, as we stand in a vast, dusty field in Yorkshire, amid hundreds of free-range pigs. “You don’t always get treated with the respect it implies, though, and that’s not just about supermarkets. Some farm shops and butchers do it. We supply them with, say, a few hundred kilos, and they’ll put our marketing stuff up and say they get all their pork from us, and then you do the maths on the sausages and it doesn’t add up.” The food industry, she says, can be a dirty business – but she has found ways to tap into public demand.

Anna, despite being told at school that “farming would be a waste of an education”, has worked on her family’s pig and arable farm all her life. It is a difficult business; if processors and retailers can find cheaper pork abroad, they will often cancel contracts with UK suppliers. The result is that Britain raises and produces only about half the pork it eats and pig farmers selling into the mass market are vulnerable to buyers’ whims.

In 2018 she became fed up with having contracts dishonoured and decided to find customers and sell direct to them. She set up the free-range Anna’s Happy Trotters, got herself a butchery, farm shop and cafe – and is now doing very nicely, thank you.

“Everyone calls me the Pig Lady, which I like. It’s funny, this is where I’m happy,” she says, as she gestures at the pig-filled field. “The cafe and the shop are harder work for me, personally.” (As if to demonstrate this, she promptly receives a call telling her a child has spilled coffee on their leg. It will mean driving to the cafe to find out what happened and fill in a report.)

“We have a real field-to-fork theme, and people really like that,” she says. “They’re interested in the pigs. They buy sausages and bacon of course, which is all year round. In the summer, everyone wants ribs and burgers for barbecues.”

It’s funny, she says. British people do eat a lot of ultra-processed food, and there is far too little knowledge about how food is produced – but, when we have time, we care more about it than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. During the pandemic, she noticed people going back to the local butchers and greengrocers and looking at where the food came from. “People were starting to cook from scratch again, and were buying more leg joints and fillets. It was great to see.” That faded as things went back to normal, but it is perhaps a sign that, despite everything, as a public we are still attached to the idea of growing food on the land around us. But how do we connect that with the need to protect the environment – and the farmers themselves?

Back in the Atkinsons’ kitchen, I ask Tom, who is home from agricultural college and working 12-hour days on the harvest, if he is ever tempted to do something else. I might as well have asked a fish if he ever fancied a spell on dry land. Yes, the hours are long, and you have to keep going when you’re not in the right headspace, but in the end, “you’re brought up in it, and it becomes your way of life. Most of all, it’s the thought of the generations that have gone before you, and the sense of pride that makes you want to keep going.”

Tom, Ted, Molly and Anna all talk about pride and a determination to keep going. This is partly a feeling of duty and destiny – it’s what they were brought up to do, it’s what they know. But talking to them, you get the feeling that it’s also about wanting to be of service in producing food, and about desiring a connection with people. A sense not dissimilar to the one we get when we look at the images of farmers on carrier bags.

It may still be easy to imagine annoying farmers who don’t seem so benevolent, but I’m not sure that’s a reason to ignore the industry’s many positives. The current generation of farmers want to be part of the solutions to the problems we all face. Yes, they may moan sometimes, but then, anyone whose living depends on the British weather is never going to be a Pollyanna. I think we’ll miss them when they’re gone.