Britain Is Losing Its Farmers, And With Them We Are Losing Our Future

I have spent a lot of time recently speaking with British farmers. Not at conferences, not on panels, but on their land, where the truth is impossible to hide. One of them runs about one thousand acres. His family has worked the same ground for generations. What should be a proud inheritance has become something closer to a burden.

This man is not lazy. He is not old fashioned. He is not waiting for help. He is doing everything possible to keep a long standing British industry alive. But the pressures on him are so relentless that he told me, very quietly, that he no longer knows if the fight is worth it.

That was the moment I realised something has gone badly wrong in this country. The people who keep us fed are being pushed to the point of collapse. And most people in Britain have no idea that this is happening.

This is not a small problem. It is not a niche rural issue. If we lose our farmers, we lose food security, thousands of jobs, entire communities, and one of the last sectors Britain still does exceptionally well.
The truth is simple. You cannot rebuild an economy if you allow the foundations to rot. And farming is one of those foundations.

The Numbers Tell You Exactly How Close We Are To Losing This Industry

In England today, agriculture employs around 279,000 people. The workforce fell by around 2 percent in one year, and casual labour dropped even more sharply. That might sound small until you understand what it represents. Farming does not have spare hands. If labour falls, production falls. If production falls, margins collapse. Eventually the wheels come off.

More than a third of English farm holders are now over 65. That would normally be fine, because farms pass to the next generation. But this is where the system breaks down. Young people are not taking over. They are refusing, and I cannot blame them.

We are asking them to inherit a business that carries heavy debt, fluctuating income, unstable policy support, rising fuel and fertiliser costs, a chronic labour shortage, and a workload that makes most office jobs look like hobbies. On top of that, we are threatening them with new inheritance tax rules that could turn their family land into a tax liability rather than a legacy worth protecting.

And if this was simply financial, you could call it tough luck. But there is a human cost. Farming has one of the highest suicide rates of any UK occupation. In 2023, 62 farmers in England and Wales took their own lives. Rates of depression, anxiety and burnout are far above the national average. Many of them feel trapped. They cannot leave because the farm is tied up in debt or family expectation. They cannot stay because the numbers no longer work.

When an entire workforce reaches breaking point, the country should pay attention.

Britain’s Farming Policy Is A Maze With No Exit

Let us be honest. British farming has not recovered from the disruption of Brexit. There were opportunities, yes, but the transition was handled badly. We left the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and replaced it with a new system of Environmental Land Management schemes.

On paper it sounded modern. Pay farmers for environmental work as well as food production. The idea itself is not wrong. The execution has been. Policies were opened, paused, rewritten and relaunched so many times that farms could not plan a single year ahead. At one point thousands of farmers were excluded from a major scheme because of an administrative error, only to be let back in later after public pressure.

Try running a business like that.
Try investing in machinery or livestock when you do not know if the government will change the rules again next spring.
Try handing a farm to your children when you cannot guarantee what support will exist in five years.

On top of that, new environmental targets suggest around ten percent of England’s farmland may need to be taken out of conventional food production by 2050. That is land lost to rewilding, tree planting or biofuel schemes. Again, the intention is not the problem. The missing piece is an actual national food strategy. If we reduce domestic production without replacing it with smart policy, we simply import more from countries with weaker standards.

This is not only a farming issue. It is a national security issue.

Fertiliser, Feed and Fuel Are Eating Farms Alive

The farmer I spent time with talked openly about the cost of inputs. Fertiliser has become a nightmare. Some products are banned, others heavily restricted, which forces farms to rely on imports. Imported fertiliser carries extra charges and taxes, and the price volatility can be extreme.

Fuel prices are up. Feed prices are unpredictable. Labour is nearly impossible to secure. A skilled farm worker is worth their weight in gold, yet Brexit removed most seasonal agricultural labour from the country and nothing meaningful has replaced it.

A survey from the last few years found that over half of farmers struggled to recruit staff, and that horticulture farms in England now average around seven workers, while others average two or fewer. That is not enough to run a modern farm.

When the cost of running a farm rises while the price shops are willing to pay remains flat, the farmer holds the loss. Most British farms are small. They cannot absorb those costs forever.

Yet instead of offering targeted support, we have created a situation where farmers have to guess what the next set of rules will be and hope the numbers add up.

Inheritance Tax Is Quietly Destroying The Future Of Family Farms

This is the part that angers farmers the most.
British farming is built on generational ownership. It is passed down through families not because of wealth, but because the skills, knowledge and responsibility take years to learn and decades to master.

When government policy starts threatening heavy inheritance tax on agricultural land, even with Agricultural Property Relief still technically in place, families begin asking whether it is worth passing the farm down at all.

Policy papers suggest that land over certain thresholds could now face twenty percent charges, with the government expecting to raise hundreds of millions from rural estates. That might sound like targeting wealthy landowners. In practice it hits the larger productive farms that employ local people, maintain landscapes, and invest heavily every year.

Meanwhile in America, the majority of family farms never pay estate tax at all because the threshold is so high. The US tax code even allows farms to value land based on its farming use rather than its market value, shaving more than a million dollars off the tax bill as long as the land remains in farming for a decade.

In other words, America protects its food producers. Britain penalises them.
And then we wonder why young people choose other careers.

If We Lose British Farming, We Lose Much More Than Food

This is not about rural nostalgia. It is about whether Britain wants to remain a serious country. A country that can feed itself. A country with real industries. A country that values the people who work the hardest jobs for the least recognition.

If British farming collapses, here is what follows:

• Food imports rise, which weakens national resilience.
• Supermarkets become more vulnerable to global shocks.
• Quality and standards fall because we are buying from countries with looser rules.
• Rural towns collapse as farms shut and families move away.
• Thousands of skilled jobs disappear.
• The countryside becomes land in name only, managed by corporations or investors who have no connection to it.

And the greatest loss of all is the generational knowledge.
The skills that grandfathers passed to fathers and fathers passed to sons and daughters. Skills that cannot be taught in a classroom. Skills that keep a nation fed.

Once that is gone, it does not come back.

Britain Deserves Better, And British Farmers Deserve Better

We need farming policy that is stable, long term and designed with farmers, not simply delivered to them.
We need tax rules that support family farms rather than punishing them.
We need clear national food strategies, not contradictory schemes that tie farmers in knots.
We need to treat food security with the same seriousness we treat energy and defence.

But beyond all of that, we need something simple.
Respect.

Respect for the people who wake before dawn, work through storms, lose sleep over livestock, and do it all because they believe in the value of feeding a country.

I have built companies in multiple industries. I have seen sectors rise and fall. And I will tell you this for free. British farming is one of the most important industries we have left. It is one of the last places where work ethic still means something, where community still means something, and where legacy is not a marketing word but a lived reality.

If we want Britain to thrive again, farming is not a side issue.
It is step one.
Because a nation that cannot feed itself cannot call itself strong.

I will be talking about this more in the months ahead. Not from a political angle, but because I cannot ignore what I have seen. When proud, hardworking people say they no longer recognise the country or the industry they grew up in, we have to listen.

Farming built Britain.
If we look after our farmers, they will help rebuild Britain again.
If we do not, we risk losing something we will never be able to replace.