Richard Stockdale

A farmer in Shropshire is selling his farm this September and nobody has died. Two hundred and twenty acres. A hundred and forty ewes, seventy suckler cows, a shed with one end held up by a telegraph pole, and a tractor bought new in 1994, which is the last thing on that farm that was bought new. His grandfather bought the place outright in 1961. He is 54 and has never had a penny of debt. The books say the farm lost eleven thousand pounds last year. It lost money the year before as well. He is not bad at this. The government's own review, chaired by Minette Batters, found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making in 2024. On paper the same farm is worth £1.9 million. Pasture in his county averaged £8,600 an acre last year, and not a pound of that was set by anything he grows. Two blocks within nine miles went to buyers he has never met. One for solar. One described in the particulars as a natural capital opportunity. His mother is 81 and lives in the bungalow at the top of the lane. When that comes across with the other half of the ground, the two halves clear the £2.5 million threshold, and twenty per cent of the excess is a bill in six figures on a business that has not made money in three years. His son is a radiographer in Telford and is not coming back. He said so once, kindly, and never made his father ask twice. So it goes now, while he can still choose which fields and to whom. He is selling the good ground first, because you cannot raise a bill off the rough. The Treasury collects nothing from any of this. The sale happens years before the tax event, so there is no tax event left to have. What Britain loses is a hundred and forty lambs and seventy calves a year, off ground that will never produce food again, in a country that already imports forty per cent of what it eats and has just had its worst cereal harvest since records began. That is one farm. There are thousands of them, doing the sums at the same kitchen table this month. The beef on your shelf this Christmas will come from Brazil, and the price will be higher, and nobody will connect the two.