Meet the household preventing to save lots of their farm from monetary wreck | UK | News | EUROtoday

Jerry Flake factors out a tractor’s large rear wheel as he hoists a hay bale the dimensions of a Ford Focus into place – it’s a maybe stunning instance of the knife-edge on which lots of the nation’s 185,000 family-run farms now discover themselves.

An already perilous state of affairs that has worsened since Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ tax-raising autumn Budget….

“Of course, those large tyres look robust but we’re farming with flint in the soil here, so we’re lucky if a tyre like that lasts a single season,” says Jerry, 67.

At a hefty £1,500 a pop, the frequent tyre replacements add to his household’s mounting payments. And there are six tractors on their 1,000-acre arable, sheep and beef enterprise throughout the South Downs National Park.

But the engaging rolling panorama may be expensively misleading.

For right here, “England’s green and pleasant land” is of somewhat poorer high quality.

Jerry provides: “The soil here is less than 6in deep and beneath that is unforgiving chalk.” So that porous bedrock makes ploughing a fragile course of.

His spouse Jenny then sums up the state of affairs for the holding, which has been in the identical household since 1901: “Quite simply, the farm is not profitable.”

Her childless brother Trevor Passmore died of most cancers in 2017 on the age of 67, leaving the farm in two shares to Jenny and to his nephew Andrew.

Jenny, now 70, continues: “Andrew was aged 22, so it was a very big decision for him to make.

“But he had always wanted to farm and lambed his first lamb when he was three. Someone said, ‘Should that child be there?’ I looked around, and there was Andrew lambing a ewe.”

For Andrew, the farm was a shock inheritance which additionally got here with the money owed of earlier generations, that have been nonetheless being rigorously managed.

He calls it “a poisoned chalice. It’s home and we are the custodians of it, but as the farmer you are at the bottom of the list.

“Above you are all the family you support, then the workers and the businesses that rely on you. The animals are sold at market and we support local butchers, tractor dealers, mechanics, vets, engineers, corn merchants and grain dealers, and numerous self-employed people and small enterprises.”

The wider household now farms it collectively however, though Andrew works for as much as 120 hours every week, “breaking even” on the land and livestock is all that the present three generations can hope for.

Jenny provides: “It’s a way of life and sustains an entire family but years ago we had to diversify to survive.”

She is the matriarchal mastermind behind Coombes Farm which is neglected at its easterly edge by the 90ft-high flying buttresses of Lancing College chapel which may be seen from miles round.

Jenny explains her view on the farm: “We don’t look at the land as having a cash value – its value is immaterial. What we want to do is be able to pass it on.”

In 1979, Jenny knew the farm needed to diversify to allow it to outlive, amid higher working prices than ever.

Open farm days in earlier years had seen as much as 10,000 guests. She continues: “I’m fourth generation and we used to employ 22 full-time workers in my grandfather’s day.

“Now we struggle to pay one person full-time. We have two part-time workers including a 16-year-old apprentice.”

Hence it’s the farm’s excursions, open lambing, annual maize maze, tenting, venue rent and agricultural contracting that collectively create the household’s revenue.The most up-to-date 12 months of open lambing resulted in 20,000 guests flocking down the muddy lane to the farm. That progress has continued with the assist of volunteers.

Jenny says proudly: “We are a working farm that opens, not a play farm. We talk about everything honestly and we show farming as it really is.

“Recently, I had two non-verbal children visiting who spoke for the first time while they were here.” One was a disabled teen, the opposite was a refugee.

“This little boy had come from a village where everything had been destroyed and his family had been killed.

“He had been put in London away from all that was familiar and was not speaking a word. But he started talking to our lambs in his own language.

“A farm is much bigger than the land that it is standing on,” she provides. Andrew concurs: “My grandad used to say that we are custodians of the land for the next generation.”

The household are united in wanting their very own subsequent technology to have the choice to proceed – that’s Connie, 5; James, three; Humphrey, one, and six-year-old cousin Jack, the son of Andrew’s sister Pamela, 32.

But even the redoubtable Jenny is having sleepless nights over the Government’s current monetary thunderbolt of creating some farms chargeable for inheritance tax for the primary time. It is a extremely controversial measure, and the Daily Express is working a campaign known as Save Britain’s Family Farms to attempt to have it dropped.

Andrew says: “Mum has worked her whole life for something that will be lost when she passes on. It is a hard picture to talk about.”

Jenny explains: “When I die, Andrew will have to sell a portion of the farm to pay the inheritance tax due on my share. It will only just be viable for him to continue with the farm after selling to pay that.

“But when Andrew dies, under the new rules it simply will not be viable for the next generation – and the farm will have to be sold.” The farm’s location within the costly South-East of England – the place land values are excessive – signifies that as soon as the loss of life duties are paid there is not going to be sufficient of the farm left over to farm.

Jenny continues: “Once a farm is gone, it’s gone forever. People keep saying that I should leave my share in trust to Andrew now, but you have to survive seven years to pass on assets placed in trust, and then where would I live?”

For she would then be legally required to pay market hire on her farm cottage reverse the beautiful Tudor farmhouse the place Andrew lives along with his spouse Gussie Harmer, 27, and their kids.

Andrew would then must pay tax on the revenue – however Jenny and Jerry would not have the cash. Like the vast majority of household farmers, they’re asset wealthy and money poor.

Jenny says: “When Trevor died of cancer, we did everything correctly to ensure the future of the farm, but we can’t pivot this fast and what happens if there are further changes?” She believes that the Government is failing to contemplate the impression of its Budget modifications on different members of the family:

“When someone dies and a house is sold, it can be left in equal portions to the children. But when you are passing down a farm things must be made fair for other members of the family, like my daughter Pamela.

“You can’t sell the farm to do this because it is also a food-production business, so it is already a complicated situation which the Government has failed to appreciate.” Andrew says he has by no means seen his inspirational mum so involved in regards to the sudden change in her household’s outlook.

It comes at some extent in her life when she may need moderately anticipated to be wanting with delight at a lifetime of onerous graft that made the farm all it’s, together with being a useful resource the place individuals within the area can study farming and the agricultural lifestyle.

Says Jenny: “It genuinely concerns me what is going to happen in the future.

“It’s so changeable. We are trying to plan to do the right thing. Andrew may have chosen a different life if he knew this was going to happen, but it’s now too late for him to make new plans.”

The household’s principal herd is pedigree Sussex beef cattle, famend for high-quality meat and a peaceful temperament.

But on a current blustery afternoon Andrew was utilizing a JCB agricultural fork-lift telehandler to unfold barley straw bedding in a barn for the shiny, darkish, cocoa-coloured Angus cross calves that have been introduced into the farm for the spring. They have been quickly busy exploring for tasty barley heads to crunch to complement their eating regimen.

Nearby, Charollais lambs – “popular with local butchers for being leaner and with more meat on the animal”, Jerry says – have been being fattened up over the winter within the heat sweet-smelling barn.

Chickens and dealing canines have been busy within the yard on my go to, as a responsible spaniel sprinted by with a stolen pheasant gripped in its jaws.

Young Connie identified: “They hang on this line before we can eat them.”

Jerry says of his younger grandchildren, who he scoops up for pictures: “Farm children have incredible common sense.”

The children are sixth technology of their father Andrew’s household, and seventh-generation farmers on their mom’s facet – Gussie additionally farms her close by household holding.

Gussie provides defiantly: “The Government have targeted the wrong bracket. Farms are high turnover and low profit, and we are at the mercy of the weather and world events – most recently Brexit and then the war in Ukraine which has had a knock-on effect on fertiliser and fuel costs.

“The minimum wage has also been upped as well as national insurance, so this had already made it more difficult to employ workers. Now some important subsidies have been pulled overnight and we are left in limbo. We don’t know what to put in the ground…”

Several members of the family joined the current tractor rally in London as farmers tried to impress upon the Government simply how dire their state of affairs is.

It took them three hours to get there at a high velocity of 30mph.

Jerry recollects: “We were in a convoy of 30 Sussex tractors from our area, and there were 650 tractors in all in central London. It was very important to be there.”

Andrew sums up the household view: “It should be everyone’s right to fresh, quality produce that has been produced locally to high standards – but the Government has pulled the grass from under our feet.”