UK poised to replace family farms with solar panels & wind turbines
National budgets always involve difficult decisions which will impact some people more than others. The recent budget passed by the UK’s new left-wing Labour government is being lambasted for dealing an especially harsh blow to farmers, and some suspect that the true aim of this government, being so wedded to Net Zero, is to drive farmers out of business and seize their land for new types of farms — producing not food but wind and solar energy.
'Sorry, son — I can't leave you the farm'
Prior to this fall’s budget, agricultural land in the UK was exempt from inheritance tax, in order to encourage farmers to pass on their land and livelihood to their children and secure the country’s food supply. The new UK government (which came to power in July of this year) now claims that this exemption was being exploited by wealthy individuals who bought up land to spare their children from having to pay inheritance tax. It is not clear whether these claims have any substantial factual basis to them.
What is clear is that from 2026, only land holdings and other farming assets worth under £1 million will continue to be exempt from inheritance tax. All other farms and land will have a 20-percent inheritance tax slapped on them.
The government claims that “only a minority” of farmers will be impacted; the National Farmers’ Union, however, counters that the new rules will affect around “75 percent of total farmed area.” For many children of farmers who had hoped to inherit their parents’ farms and won’t be able to find the money to pay the tax-man, what the new policy means is selling the family farm.
Tom Bradshaw is the president of the National Farmers’ Union. He predicts disastrous results for British farming unless the government backtracks.
Let’s not sugar-coat this. Every penny the [government] saves from this will come directly from the next generation having to break-up their family farm. If farms are being broken up and sold, British food will be hit. There is a very real threat to our long-term food security because there is no incentive to invest for the future.
Countryside on fire
In another piece of bad news, which has garnered less media attention, the government has also altered the classification of several types of pick-up trucks commonly used by farmers, designating them as “cars” and thus liable for much higher tax rates.
Altogether, farmers are furious and frightened for the future. Many are planning to take part in massive protests including blocking ports and withholding farm produce and livestock from the market.
Bradshaw, while trying to calm stormy emotions, is also sounding the alarm in the hope that the government will take action to avert a crisis.
We will continue to try and work with the government to get to a resolution but something has to change. I have never seen the weight of support, the strength of feeling and anger that there is in this industry today. Many of them want to be militant.
Now, we are not encouraging that in any way shape or form, but government need to understand that there is a real strength of feeling behind what this change means for the future of family farming in this country.
Meanwhile, a 78-year-old farmer, John Charlesworth, has committed suicide due to, his son says, being “eaten away” at the prospect of his family losing his lands, valued at around £2 million. Charlesworth’s farm is just 70 acres, well within the definition of a “small family farm” according to the USDA. It thus seems highly unlikely that the new budgetary measures will only impact the wealthy. In fact, the wealthy are best placed to be able to cover the tax bill; it is only the smaller farmers, just managing to get by, who will have to sell to pay the government.
'We don't need small farmers'
Speaking to The Telegraph, Bradshaw said that he “would be delighted to have a meeting with [PM] Keir Starmer or [Chancellor of the Exchequer] Rachel Reeves. I’m convinced if we could have half an hour with either, we can talk them through the unintended consequences of this policy, both the human impact and the impact on food production.”
His attempts to arrange such a meeting have failed so far, however. There appears to be little political appetite for speaking to the farmers or their representatives.
Worse still, a senior figure in the Labour party, a former close aide to previous Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair told media that as far as he was concerned, the farmers could go under — and he hoped that the government would stick by its tax plans and push them through regardless of the consequences.
The government should “do to the farmers what Thatcher did to the miners,” John McTernan told GB News, referring to the miners’ strikes at the end of the 1970s and the government’s refusal to back down to the miners’ demands.
We don’t need small farmers. If the farmers want to go on the streets, we can do to them what Margaret Thatcher did. It’s an industry we can do without. If people are so upset that they want to go on the streets and spread slurry, then we don’t need small farmers.
Are farmers garbage, or just deplorable?
McTernan’s comments were roundly condemned by politicians from across the spectrum. Andrew RT Davies, the leader of the center-right Conservative party in Wales, said:
These comments are disgraceful, but are sadly indicative of how many people in the Labour Party seem to feel.
It’s clear that, for many on the Left, the anti-farmer agenda is a new frontier in the class war, whereby farmers are being punished for not sharing the metropolitan world views of those in London and other cities.
PM Starmer also condemned the comments, insisting that he was “absolutely committed to supporting our farmers.”
I will do everything I can to support them because I think it’s essential that they not only prosper, but prosper well into the future. So I totally disagree with those comments.
Government land grab
Regardless of Starmer’s words, agricultural experts are warning that imperiling family farms could put the country’s food security at risk and make the UK more dependent on food imports at a time when the international trade scene is becoming steadily more volatile.
According to the director of one large supermarket chain, “Sixty percent of the food we eat in the UK originates from British farmers and growers, and there is increasingly little incentive to produce the food that we rely on them for.”
If a large number of family farms are sold, food prices will almost certainly rise across the country, primarily for staple products such as cereals, meat, dairy, and eggs, which are mostly locally sourced.
If farms are sold to other farmers, there may be less reason for concern. However, one idea that is gaining currency is that the government plans to seize control of agricultural land via the inheritance tax grab and use it not for farming food but for wind and solar farms.
According to renewable energy expert Gareth Phillips, farmers have in the past blocked government plans to dedicate arable land to energy plants. Now, however, facing giant tax bills, they may be far more inclined to lease some of their land to the government if not sell it outright, in order to save at least part of their property.
Following the changes announced in Wednesday’s budget, landowners will now be much more incentivized to look at leasing land to renewable developers as a way of finding new income streams to top up the loss. It may also trigger more sales of farm land by those who need to fund the payment of inheritance tax, meaning more land becomes available for different uses.
Two new wind turbines a day — for the next five years
If this is indeed a motivating factor for the government, it couldn’t have come at a better time for Labour. The party's Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, is a crusading environmentalist which in this day and age means not worrying about trees and flowers but about solar panels and wind turbines.
Miliband is dedicated and determined to achieve his dream of Net Zero by 2030, despite the warnings of many that it is simply impossible to achieve. A recent report published by the UK’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) stressed that in order to decarbonize the power grid within the next five years, Britain will have to double onshore wind capacity, triple offshore wind, and quadruple solar power.
Aside from the price tag running into the billions of pounds, Miliband will also have to ensure that the building of thousands of 800-foot-tall turbines and the erection of thousands of solar panels actually goes ahead, despite protests of local communities many of which are vehemently opposed to the blight on the countryside.
Miliband will also have to build thousands of new, giant electricity pylons to transport all the power these turbines and panels are supposed to produce.
To put this into perspective, it will mean installing two new turbines every single day for the next five years.
Solar panels will have to cover an additional 250,000 acres of farmland, primarily in the south of the country where the weather is somewhat more suited to producing solar energy (although many would dispute the notion that solar is at all suited to the UK climate).
Not in my back garden
Protest groups are already sprouting up all over the UK, determined to block the erection of pylons, turbines, and panels. According to Ashley Kelty, an energy analyst, the government will only manage to ram through its plans regardless of opposition by “suspending the planning rules, with developers given carte blanche to put up pylons or turbines wherever they choose.”
This would seem to open up a golden opportunity for opposition parties Reform and the Conservatives — only the next general election is almost five years away, by which time, it may be too late.
Miliband, meanwhile, promises that the fears are groundless and that his plans will lead to “affordable, secure power” for everyone.
Less water + less fertilizer = higher crop yields?
Power is vitally necessary, of course. But so is food. Labour insists that it has everything under control and that it will be investing record sums in farming. Not just any type of farming, however — “sustainable farming.”
Just what is “sustainable food production”? According to a Labour party document, it involves “higher crop yields and more efficient production whilst recognizing environmental constraints."
Over the last two decades, UK farmers have increased yields while reducing the use of fertilizers and greenhouse gas emissions. We will look to build on these achievements while reducing water use, fertilizers and pesticides, and reducing soil erosion which costs agriculture £45 million a year.
All farmers want to increase yields and most would prefer to be able to do so without using fertilizer and pesticides. Yet what the government seems to be demanding, and claiming to already be happening, is higher yields despite less usage of measures to enable this outcome.
How can one resolve this conundrum?
Collective farming for the 21st century
Possibly one answer is tucked away in an article in an obscure journal, Nature Cities, published earlier this year. The article focuses on what it calls “urban agriculture,” and proposes a new strategy “to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable.”
Key to this new strategy is centralization — or perhaps one might be justified in calling it collectivization. The study stresses that urban agriculture (small plots of land farmed by individuals or families) have a huge “carbon footprint” in comparison to larger plots:
Results reveal that the carbon footprint of food from UA [urban agriculture] is six times greater than conventional agriculture (420 gCO2e versus 70 gCO2e per serving).
The study's authors suggest that UA farms should be disallowed and that instead, central areas should be used to farm in a more “environmentally friendly” way.
Could it be that Keir Starmer’s Labour government actually wants to move away from family farms in order to centralize farming and help it achieve its Net Zero targets?
Let them eat tomatoes
But there is a bright spot in the Nature Cities study. Apparently, some crops such as tomatoes “outperform conventional agriculture” in terms of their climate impact.
So, let the farmers grow, and eat, tomatoes?
