Big Farmer doth protest too much, says Maddy Harland in this report from the Oxford Real Farming Conference

The Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) is held at the same time as the Oxford Farming Conference in January. This year it topped 2,000 delegates in person and many online participants. The NFU event is steady at 600 delegates.

This year, we had to walk the last leg of our bus trip into town to attend conference because farmers had blocked the road with a long line of large tractors. They were wielding placards, protesting about the Inheritance Tax Laws introduced in the 2024 Autumn Budget. The tax reform now kicks in at 20% at a £1million threshold whereas before farms could be passed down tax free. And a million pounds is nothing in a society where property and land prices are over-inflated.

It isn’t, however, quite as it seems. Small farmers with spouses and access to other allowances can pass on property worth £3million tax-free. Tax is then paid interest-free over 10 years. (IHT threshold for the rest of the population is £1million for a married couple at 40% and we cannot give our children our homes and still live in them tax-free.)

£3million doesn’t go far in valuing land and buildings in Britain. Farms have been encouraged to diversify and create holiday accommodation and commercial letting adding additional value to the portfolio. There have also been valuable capital grants pre-Brexit for equipment and buildings.

Even so, farms can still be passed down to the next generation providing the owner lives a full seven years after the gift. Bigger land portfolios are often held in trust outside the reach of IHT and so IHT is still a ‘voluntary’ tax. The reality is that most small family farms under 120 hectares will not be affected.

There are two factors that need attention here. First, rather like women born in the 1950s and suddenly told they had to wait 5-6 years for a pension, the government has offered no transitional period of staggered relief to allow small farms without access to tax lawyers to get their ducks in order. Then there is an absence of scrutiny from the media, just an uncontested reporting of NFU demonstrations, and tractors blocking main roads with the police passively standing by.

Imagine if Just Stop Oil froze central Oxford or Westminster for a morning; activists would be imprisoned. Last year we exceeded the 1.5°C global heating threshold that the IPCC declared was the danger level. Wildfires have ravaged LA, Canada, and Europe and whole communities have been destroyed. In Europe and Asia, flooding is now frequent and devastating. Yet climate activists are not allowed to protest and when we do, we are threatened by custodial sentences. Yet there are different rules for the NFU, the ‘landowners’ union’, as Simon Fairlie describes it.

In France it’s a different story. You cannot buy agricultural land unless you can prove you intend to farm it and you have the skills. Hence land prices are at 10% of UK prices because land is not a hitherto tax-free asset in a property portfolio that can also trade in carbon credits and attract subsidies. (See Guardian article here for more.)

Thank goodness for ORFC, which is a movement of regenerative sanity in a mad and corrupt world. I was heartened by the breadth of subjects there. I enjoyed listening to farmers speaking about access to land saying that everyone should be able to roam the countryside responsibly because connection to the land is a fundamental part of good mental health.

This was a theme. Getting people back on to farms as volunteers, paid workers and visitors is a fundamental principle. Empty mechanised farms are not healthy for the land or people. There are now clusters of NGOs working together to ‘land match’ farmers with potential tenants in England and Wales.

Outside of the industrial farming model are many regenerative farmers and wilders who do not need or want to manage all their acreage. They are actively seeking young growers. And of course, perhaps our tax shake-up will release some large land holdings to their tenants in a similar way to the post-First World War ‘Death Duties’, which saw a quarter of cultivated land changing from being tenanted to owned by farmers in the 1920s.

I know from personal experience how therapeutic being connected to the land is. I grew up in London, yet I never felt disconnected from nature. Being able to garden and farm (organically and regeneratively) needs to be a human right, whether we own land or not. It would transform our society for the better in so many ways. We would develop so many resilient, practical and community-based skills.

I was inspired by a session in Oxford by the writer, historian and artist, Dr JC Niala, who reminded us of Section 23 of the 1908 Allotment Act; when six people in different local postcodes demand the right to an allotment it is a legal imperative. Yes, it might take years to acquire land but not in every case. These (often) urban allotments are radical spaces of social plurality and cooperation. They must not be lost to developers.

Maddy Harland is the co-founder of Permaculture Magazine and Permanent Publications, a publishing company dedicated to practical and leading-edge solutions to global problems.

This article has been adapted from the editorial, Permaculture issue 123, Spring 2025.
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