The Pearces were farming the Fens of jap England for generations – a area the place greater than a 3rd of the rustic’s greens are grown, packed and processed. Andy and Rebecca Pearce hire a small relatives farm in south Lincolnshire with Andy’s oldsters and brother, on which they develop potatoes, wheat, pulses and sugar beet. They grew peas too till this 12 months, when the unpredictable climate not made them viable.
Visiting their farm on a positive summer season day, the panorama feels idyllic – a in large part flat panorama of huge skies and black soil, epic fields and waterways. As he drives round in his tractor, Andy helps to keep a diary of all of the flora and fauna he sees: starlings, sparrows, badgers and buzzards, kestrels, wagtails, hares and deer. It’s a role he and Rebecca discuss with hobby and love – but he says that sense of vocation is clouded with ever-increasing cash worries:
Have a look at the cost of grain now: £180 a tonne – it used to be almost certainly that within the mid-Nineteen Nineties … I will’t recall to mind every other business this is running at the similar worth as they had been 30 years in the past for produce. But the inputs have long past up astronomically.
In 2021-22 (the most recent govt statistics), the common farm family source of revenue in England used to be simply £22,200. A 2025 file via the Meals, Farming and Geographical region Fee discovered that UK farmers’ earning have remained stagnant over the last half-century, whilst prices have not too long ago escalated, as Pearce explains:
In our case, hire is clearly one of the crucial greatest outlays. Chemical compounds, fertilisers, tractors – you identify it, the whole lot has long past up astronomically … The ridiculous prices of equipment, the stuff you’ve were given to do, the quantity of pink tape you’ve were given to fill in, are all going a technique.
He warns that farming is turning into an “impossible dream” for other folks like them – and that that is mirrored within the reluctance of younger other folks to become involved. He says it’s “almost impossible for somebody to come in now and start farming without some sort of backing”, explaining:
The sustainability of farming is getting much less and no more always … Until you’ve were given a large sufficient house to offset all that [expense], then it’s getting very, very tricky now. And that’s now not going to modify … You’re going to lose your relatives farms. You’re principally going to be left with agribusinesses on the finish of the day.
Over the last 3 years, we have now spent numerous time within the Fens getting to understand farmers just like the Pearces. Our purpose used to be to move past the polarised headlines to know how farmers in point of fact really feel, and what they would like from govt coverage. For one among us (Dan), this paperwork a part of Fen Energy, a analysis challenge exploring how native infrastructure, id and connection shapes financial sustainability and political agree with on this a part of rural England.
A trailer for the Fen Energy challenge.
Regardless of farmers being extremely professional and hardworking professionals who assist take care of the United Kingdom’s meals safety and offer protection to its geographical region, many advised us they really feel deserted via the federal government and concerned about their long run. However delving deeper into the roots of this sadness, we discovered a extra nuanced and sophisticated tale than is from time to time introduced in media experiences in regards to the farmers’ protests.
A privilege or a curse?
Peter Lundgren farms the black soils of the Fens additional north in Lincolnshire. Now in his sixties, he says farming is a “huge privilege – being able to walk across that field and ask nobody’s permission to do it”.
Lundgren – a non-organic farmer who campaigns in opposition to destructive pesticide and GM use – influenced a previous Conservative govt’s coverage shift to hyperlink farming extra carefully with the supply of public items. This integrated new subsidies to inspire farmers to offer protection to biodiversity via planting extra hedgerows and forest, moderately than focusing fully on business meals manufacturing.
Lundgren admits he leads a “very, very privileged lifestyle” – and as we stroll round his gorgeous small property amongst dykes and forest he has painstakingly restored, it’s arduous to disagree. But now, he’s promoting up.
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In contrast to the Pearces, he has one thing to promote: Lundgren purchased his 93-acre farm 30 years in the past when it used to be rundown and collapsing. Having grown up on a suffering farm which in the end succumbed to debt, he has all the time sought a style of farming that’s economically and environmentally sustainable. However now, whilst have compatibility sufficient to proceed, Lundgren says his hobby is not there:
This spring, it shook me. I took rusty scrap into the scrap sellers in Lincoln, and I were given more cash a tonne for scrap steel than I were given for my feed wheat … So the bread of lifestyles is value not up to rusty steel.
Many small- and medium-sized farmers to find themselves underneath those rising financial pressures. Past the quick crises of more and more unpredictable climate or govt coverage, Lundgren says it comes right down to the loss of energy farmers have within the wider meals machine, the place supermarkets and massive providers pressure down costs. The United Kingdom hen business, for instance, is ruled via a handful of enormous firms, so farmers may also be pressured right into a loop of getting to spend money on large, dear sheds with a purpose to provide those few firms, as no person else buys hen at this scale. As Lundgren places it:
They’ll get a farmer to take a position half of 1,000,000 quid in a hen shed – after which they’ve were given that farm precisely the place they would like them … They know they’ve were given you underneath the thumb, and you currently are a slave to [these companies].
Maximum farmers have an impressive sense of vocation in stewarding their land for long run generations. However Lundgren says financial lack of confidence is doing away with many farmers’ kids from taking on the trade. “One friend farms over in Norfolk … Both his sons have turned around and said: ‘You are bloody joking, dad.’”
Lundgren talks poignantly in regards to the “feeling that you’ve let down past generations … that feeling of failure”. The industrial decline he describes (in pints of beer) spans a long time, now not simply contemporary years:
The primary crop of wheat I grew, I were given £120 a tonne for it – when I used to be 18 and beer used to be 50p a pint. So I were given 240 pints for each tonne going off the farm. Closing 12 months, I were given £65 a tonne and beer has come as much as £3. So now, I’m getting 20 pints a tonne.
Farmer Peter Lundgren protests in opposition to farmers’ remedy.
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The issue, as Lundgren sees it, is going a lot deeper than the federal government’s contemporary insurance policies that experience sparked such ire in lots of farmers – maximum significantly, the announcement that farmers would not be exempt from paying inheritance tax. From 2026, upon their demise, any farm or trade belongings value over £1 million may just face a 20% inheritance tax over that threshold (with some exceptions). However for Lundgren, those tax adjustments are simply every other layer of chance in an already precarious career. They exacerbate the elemental downside of being “asset rich, cash poor” that is affecting such a lot of in agriculture:
One of the most worst issues is from time to time you set your hand to your again pocket and haven’t were given the cost of a pint – even supposing on paper, you’re value a shitload of cash.
This is going to the guts of occasional social media backlashes to the farmers’ protests. Rebecca Pearce describes the preferred stereotype of farmers as wealthy aristocrats in tweeds, taking pictures foxes and “raping the countryside” with insecticides and shoddy practices.
There’s a grain of fact on this symbol: round 30% of English land is owned via the aristocracy and landed gentry, and a vital additional percentage is held via rich people together with offshore companies and funding bankers (every other 17% of land stays unregistered with the Land Registry, making possession unclear). In contemporary a long time, rich people have purchased farmland to offset their tax liabilities – a key reason why given via Labour for introducing the brand new inheritance tax laws.
However in observe, many bizarre relatives farms are being swept up on this new tax regime. In line with estimates from the Nationwide Farmers Union and the Agriculture and Horticulture Building Board, round 75% of industrial farms – some 42,000 throughout England and Scotland – will likely be affected.
Andy Pearce: ‘Chemicals, fertilisers, tractors – you name it, everything has gone up astronomically.’
{Photograph} via Rebecca Pearce, CC BY-NC-ND
For the reason that farms are ceaselessly in one of the vital most pretty and sought-after places for 2nd properties and belongings traits in the United Kingdom, the capital belongings (corresponding to land and structures) of those farms are ceaselessly extremely precious, even though the farms themselves produce earning for his or her house owners which can be little over the minimal salary.
And whilst round 60% of British farmers are tenants just like the Pearces, who don’t personal the land they paintings, many nonetheless perform inside family-run farm companies that come with owned belongings corresponding to equipment, farm animals, saved produce or residential structures. In some instances, those belongings by myself would possibly push their estates above the £1 million threshold for complete reduction, or above the £3 million mark the place inheritance tax liabilities start to upward push considerably.
TV programmes corresponding to (Jeremy) Clarkson’s Farm have put the on a regular basis struggles of farmers extra squarely at the map, and round 55% of the general public say they’d strengthen farmers in the event that they had been to move on strike, consistent with strengthen for nurses and paramedics. In April 2025, the United Kingdom’s first farmers’ strike broke out, with some farmers refusing to load milling wheat wanted for Britain’s bakeries.
Whilst a one-off match, it will not be the remaining. A up to date Ashbridge survey of two,000 British farmers urged that 39% in their farms could be “unsustainable” inside 5 years. There are actually two choices for many farmers to stick afloat: accentuate meals manufacturing, or promote up.
Lundgren has put his farm up on the market.
Small-scale farmers play a key position in protective the United Kingdom geographical region and its biodiversity.
{Photograph} via Amy Gibbons, CC BY-NC-ND
Why farming is this kind of gamble
Farming isn’t only a trade, it’s a bet. Take a tonne of wheat: the seed purchased one month in the past and put within the flooring lately will likely be harvested in as much as a 12 months’s time – which means the farmer most effective will get paid for it in 18 months.
Now issue within the volatility of costs set via the worldwide marketplace amid the unpredictability of Brexit, COVID and Ukraine – to not point out the elements. Within the Fens and lots of different portions of the United Kingdom, 2024’s strangely rainy climate flooded and submerged many farmers’ vegetation.
Then there’s the volatility of presidency insurance policies, from the long-term EU subsidies of the Commonplace Agricultural Coverage that made farming viable in an technology of inexpensive meals, to the hotchpotch of environmental insurance policies post-Brexit, which lately many farmers to find incoherent and poorly applied. In line with Andy Pearce: “It’s a case of giving with one hand, and taking away at least as much with the other.”
There are lots of dangers farmers have little coverage from – together with the hardball practices of supermarkets enticing in worth wars. Farmers in the United Kingdom most commonly provide supermarkets by means of providers, who’ve the ability to reject or even positive farmers for now not supplying to the fitting same old or amount. Costs were squeezed artificially low for many years via providers and supermarkets, even whilst new applied sciences and govt directives have abruptly greater yields.
The one reason why maximum farmers have remained in trade is thru huge subsidies just like the EU’s Commonplace Agricultural Coverage, which inspired high-input (high-fertiliser) farming and rewarded large landowners. However subsidies are double-edged: some farmers assume the machine allowed supermarkets to escape with paying low costs, as a result of subsidies intended farmers would by no means face the specter of going into chapter 11.
After the United Kingdom left the EU, the Conservative govt offered a brand new strategy to farming: “Public money for public goods.” Farmers had been now to be incentivised to prioritise sustainability and environmentalism over business meals manufacturing, within the form of Environmental Land Control schemes and the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI).
When offered in 2021, those insurance policies had been in most cases broadly embraced via farmers – all of whom, in our analysis, absolutely subscribed to an ethos of sustainability and public carrier.
However from the outset, prerequisites for having access to those price range had been tricky. They required vital funding of money and time prematurely, with bills later. They set prerequisites which can be tricky, arbitrary and arduous. Next rollout and cost supply used to be gradual. They just equipped a monetary praise to those that ship environmental advantages consistent with the objectives of a 25-year surroundings plan that works against reaching web 0 via 2050. In line with Andy Pearce:
There’s completely not anything in it for us in any respect, principally … It is only now not economically viable.
In December 2023, the Fundamental Fee Scheme – a longstanding govt subsidy that equipped a fundamental source of revenue protection web for lively farms – got here to an finish. It used to be changed from January 2024 via delinked bills: time-limited strengthen according to previous claims, with decrease general investment and less farms eligible.
This used to be adopted in November 2024 via the suspension of a number of capital grants schemes to new candidates because of excessive call for. Then, at quick realize, in March 2025, the SFI scheme used to be suspended to new entrants after achieving its annual finances cap.
Over the last decade, throughout each Conservative and Labour governments, British farmers were step by step stripped of maximum assets of economic strengthen. A turbulent and abruptly converting coverage panorama has left few farmers in a position to adequately financially plan. In the meantime, the price of inputs upward push, costs stay low, inheritance tax looms, and the paintings stays grindingly arduous. Consider between govt and farmers hasn’t ever been decrease. Andy Pearce says:
Within the best-case state of affairs, I’m going to come back out evens. If I’ve a in point of fact excellent harvest, I’m going to be dropping cash doing this scheme … Principally, we’ve were given the worst of each worlds. Now we’re competing in opposition to subsidised produce from Europe with out the subsidies.
Farmers are wondering the incentives equipped for sustainability and environmentalism.
{Photograph} via Amy Gibbons, CC BY-NC-ND
‘There’s were given to be a complete reconsider’
Now not everybody fascinated with farming is a freeholder or tenant. Some, like Martin Reams, paintings as farm managers for massive agribusinesses that produce intensively at scale. They ceaselessly paintings lengthy hours at the land with the similar hobby and vocation as relatives farmers just like the Pearces and Lundgren.
Reams oversees operations on a 2,000-acre farm in Lincolnshire with simply two staff. They develop wheat, barley, peas, potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower. Come harvest time, they’ll draw on labour from jap Europe – many migrant employees have additionally settled (most commonly within the mid-to-late 2000s) and built-in into the native house.
Reams has farmed all his lifestyles; from his relatives’s smallholding to managing farms internationally. No two days are the similar and he’s outdoor on a daily basis, come rain or shine. Additionally in his sixties, Reams has lived via a big technological revolution in farming.
While as soon as farms had been labour-intensive and controlled via hand, tractor and a crude working out of fertilisers, lately farms like his are controlled the usage of GPS box scans, smartphones, robotics, fine-tuned pc methods and self-driving tractors. And out within the fields, 12 months after 12 months, Reams says he has witnessed the affects of local weather alternate at first-hand:
And not using a shadow of a doubt, the elements has modified dramatically over the 45 years I’ve actively been running on farms … The large factor I’ve spotted is the quantity of rain we get. It’s both all or not anything. Both very dry or very rainy. And that is without doubt one of the primary riding forces this is in point of fact [forcing us to upscale] what we’re doing.
Reams doesn’t personal a farm, however like everybody else we spoke with, he’s dismayed via the alternate in inheritance tax laws, suggesting it is going to “probably kibosh a lot of the smaller farms”.
Many farmers we spoke to concern that, as extra small- and medium-size farmers are pushed to promote as much as greater agribusinesses and sun farms, the factors of meals manufacturing will fall, as the United Kingdom turns into reliant on reasonable in another country manufacturers now not sure via the similar environmental rules.
Reams says merely: “We’re not on a level playing field.” When requested about farming’s long run, his evaluation is blunt:
At this time second, I might say disregard it – it’s doomed. It’s going to be just like the coal mines, it’s going to be just like the fisheries. There’s were given to be a complete reconsider on meals manufacturing, how other folks price meals.
In this day and age, the common age of British farmers is 59. It’s an identical across the world, and a 3rd of British farmers are over 65 and must be taking part in retirement. Lots of the farmers we spoke to talked in regards to the obstacles for brand new entrants into farming: excessive quantities of capital to get began, tricky and lengthy paintings, with median farm family earning ceaselessly under the minimal salary.
Having grown up on suffering farms, many farmers’ kids – together with Lundgren’s – have little interest in taking on the career, and farmers seem much less prone to inspire them to practice of their footsteps. While the general public we interviewed labored on farms as kids, lately such practices are in large part outlawed or frowned upon.
In reaction, some agricultural schools are doing their ideally suited to draw younger other folks to farming, and in recent times there was a slight building up within the choice of scholars enrolling to check land-based and agricultural levels round the United Kingdom. We met one instance of this attainable new era of farmers amid an array of lovely flora within the north-east of England.
Roisin Taylor: the way forward for horticulture.
Photograph via Jocelyn Pritchard, CC BY-NC-ND
Regeneration is imaginable
“Why have I not been doing this my entire life?” Roisin Taylor asks us, having not too long ago established a two-acre flower farming trade on a brand new website online close to Newcastle (her mom having at the start based the corporate). She’s now not being sarcastic.
Taylor grew up in County Durham, running on farms and dry-stone walling. Like many her age, she took the college direction, finishing two levels sooner than coming again into farming and agricultural neighborhood engagement. A co-director of UK Early life 4 Nature and Nuffield farming pupil, she researches how the British cut-flower business must adapt to an international of two-degree warming.
Having now not come from a farming relatives at once, and regardless of dealing with the brand new entrant obstacles – significantly the difficulties of securing land – Taylor’s tale suggests farming can nonetheless be a profession and way of life that draws younger other folks.
She is the way forward for horticulture – specifically, its want to adapt to local weather alternate. She requires a long-term standpoint the place “public money for public good” is used to make farming a high-skill, high-conservation catalyst for alternate. On the similar time, she highlights the screw ups of the present renting type, specifically for small-scale farming:
It’s horrifying that any individual may have regulate over a big portion of my trade. It makes it tougher to spend money on the long-term purchases you want to make your companies sustainable.
Whilst Taylor does now not paintings in meals manufacturing, flower farming has additionally been suffering from the coverage “chaos” that different interviewees have highlighted to us. In 2023 on the time of talking to Taylor, the former govt’s plan for a brand new horticulture technique used to be rapidly scrapped. Talking extra broadly about how farmers had been feeling, Taylor advised us:
In case you don’t really feel such as you’ve were given a voice, after all you’re going to move out and bitch since you don’t really feel you’ve were given company … The cycle of mistrust continues to develop. Motivation is pushed via momentum, and we want some wins to end up to farmers, growers and policymakers that modify is imaginable.
Roisin Taylor: ‘The cycle of distrust continues to grow.’
Photograph via Jocelyn Pritchard, CC BY-NC-ND
Previous this 12 months, the Nationwide Farmers’ Union printed a UK horticulture technique for expansion during which it welcomes the federal government’s promised “roadmap” for farming in England as much as 2050 as “an ambitious vision to make farming and growing more sustainable and profitable”. In her roles each as farmer and recommend, Taylor targets to behave as a bridge between farmers, policymakers and environmentalists, and is assured they are able to to find not unusual flooring:
Each farmers and environmentalists are seeking to transfer the dial forwards. They’re simply seeking to each make a dwelling and likewise see a long run the place one thing is healthier … [But] public belief of farming is steeped in inaccuracies, which does the field no favours once we are seeking to recommend for alternate.
Nevertheless, Taylor is in it for the lengthy haul. A part of the gamble and privilege of farming, she says, is operating to a for much longer time-frame – with the want to additionally imagine “building things like climate adaptation into that long-term framework and planning”. However is time operating out?
The way forward for farming
We’re again with Andy and Rebecca Pearce of their cottage. Andy’s mum brings in mugs of tea, adopted via his brother popping in to test they’ve were given sufficient oil for the tractor. “It used to be a man with a spanner who’d come out and fix it, now it’s a man with a laptop,” Rebecca quips.
Despite the fact that the Pearces are tenant farmers, they’re mired in the similar demanding situations and uncertainty as many different small and medium-sized farmers we spoke with. Andy tells us that from a smaller farmer’s perspective, “the sustainability of farming is getting less and less all the time”.
As prices for farmers develop and revenues shrink, he says that “unless you’ve got a big enough area to offset that, then it’s getting very, very difficult now. That’s not going to change.” His analysis is obvious:
You’re going to lose your relatives farms. You’re principally going to be left with agribusinesses on the finish of the day.
Andy Pearce: ‘You’re going to lose your relatives farms.’
Photograph via Rebecca Pearce, CC BY-NC-ND
We heard this message over and over from the farmers, farm managers, agronomists (who find out about the science of soil control and crop manufacturing) and rural communities we spoke with.
And but the dying of relatives farms isn’t some herbal inevitability, just like the melting of glaciers or the mizzley rain in those portions.
Farmers are from time to time criticised for over-extracting from the herbal surroundings to place meals on our tables. However they’re only one piece of the jigsaw. It isn’t simply the soil that’s depleted via overextraction; the individuals who produce our meals and offer protection to our geographical region also are being depleted. At its root, Taylor says, is the truth that “we don’t pay what food’s worth”.
Farmers aren’t the one crew in society scuffling with the results of inflation. However they’re in all probability uniquely uncovered. In contrast to many companies that may merely shift their prices directly to consumers whilst keeping up benefit, farmers are on the frontline of a fancy trendy meals machine during which the associated fee we pay for our meals, maximum ceaselessly in supermarkets, has been saved low for many years via in depth worth squeezing.
But it surely’s now not simply farmers that suffer because of this. Lundgren talks a couple of basic “divorce” between farmers and customers in trendy society:
I feel my argument about farmers being divorced from customers, it’s very a lot across the introduction of the meals chain. The additional we get pressured aside is every other hyperlink in that rattling chain in order that any person else can get in and make some huge cash.
Reams provides a memorable instance of this breakdown within the connection between customers and their meals:
I went to a faculty now not very a long way from right here in rural Lincolnshire, took a sugar beet, and no person knew what it used to be. In rural Lincolnshire! They didn’t know what it used to be.
This disconnect breeds misconceptions and bewilderment on all sides – as Rebecca Pearce expresses over tea of their farmhouse cottage:
I don’t in point of fact perceive why other folks hate farmers such a lot, when everyone eats.
In our plastic-packed, supermarket-fed global, numerous the general public doesn’t perceive the place meals comes from – nor have the time to determine. At the different aspect, most of the farmers we spoke to assume that all of the public desires is reasonable similar meals, with little regard for who makes it and with what method.
Nor is true, as Lundgren explains in characteristically vibrant taste:
Farmers will come within the pub on a Friday night time and say: ‘The public don’t care so long as it’s reasonable.’ Which is absolute crap. And the general public will say: ‘You by no means see a farmer on his motorcycle – [instead] riding round in Vary Rovers shouting “get off my land!”‘ Which could also be crap.
What’s simple is that the British meals machine is underneath immense pressure. Shoppers are failing to get get right of entry to to reasonably priced, nutritious meals, and lots of farmers are suffering to take care of a fundamental livelihood or go on their farms to their kids. As Rebecca Pearce says:
We’ve started working in conjunction with environmental teams and everyone to check out and get farming [better understood]. There must be a discussion.
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