Farmer Focus: Family toil considerations after Budget

Winter has officially started, although it still feels autumnal.

The cattle are in their winter homes now. Heifers stay a few miles down the road on land that was a clay pit used to supply the family brickworks that my dad ran in days of yore.

See also: Former Labour aide says UK ‘doesn’t need farmers’

About the author

Ben Harman

A fourth-generation farmer with 247ha on the Chiltern Hills, Ben Harman owns the UK’s oldest herd of Charolais, as well as Salers and meat brand “Chagyu” (Charolais cross Wagyu). He is chairman of the British Cattle Breeders Club, vice-chairman of the National Beef Association and is a Checs board member. 

Read more articles by Ben Harman

That venture ceased to be viable in the fuel crises of the 1970s, when 75% or more of brick price was taken up by the cost of fuel used in the kilns.

The clay pit was filled in with domestic and “clean” industrial waste, then covered over with three feet of chalk.

This makes it the only field on this flinty farm that will hold cattle over winter. The rest of my menagerie is housed.

Halfway through feeding and bedding up this morning, I stopped for breakfast with Mum and Dad, who still live in the old farmhouse.

Dad was reminiscing – in 1951, the farm was 100ha and employed 12 people. In 1955, my grandfather took on an extra 80-odd hectares that had been bought by the Diocese of St Albans.

The diocese was back in the market in 1983, and Dad took on a further 70ha (173 acres) or so that they had bought.

This year, they have returned to the market, and I feel enormously fortunate to have been entrusted with a further 110ha (272 acres) of theirs to farm.

That leaves us farming 376ha (929 acres) – us being me and my compliance manager/cowgirl/TikToker extraordinaire, Daisy, who works with me in the mornings before heading off to milk cows in the afternoons.

I try to farm sustainably across all three pillars: economic, environmental and social.

I try to produce food. Barely a week goes past without an approach from a solar company offering about £1,000/acre index linked.

Should I take the money and secure the future of the farm against the whims and malice of the chancellor of the exchequer?

Is that the legacy I’ll choose after generations of toil by my forbears? Nope. I choose to produce food and enhance biodiversity on the land I steward.

I reckon the tax accountants, solicitors and land agents will take more money than HMRC will from the chancellor’s recent looting of the food industry.