How ‘green lairds’ are ousting Britain’s traditional food producers
It was the first time I had ever seen eight men carry a coffin, and what really made such an impression was that they were all sons of the dead man and each one was a farmer. I don’t think I will ever witness such a sight again.
It was 1998 and a huge crowd of farming folk was there to bury Colin Carruthers, ‘senior tenant’ on the Lowther Estates near Penrith in Cumbria, where five of his sons were also tenants. Colin senior farmed at Winder Hall with sons Colin, Jack and Tony. Six miles away near Shap was Peter at Rawfoot and Geoff at Towcett.
The term senior tenant was a mark of respect for one who had farmed the longest on a landed estate and on whom it might fall to make a speech at the annual tenants’ dinner, or to organise a whip round of his fellow tenants to buy a gift, usually silver, to mark the laird’s marriage. I remember an elegant silver box, lined in cedar, sitting on a side table at home and smelling deliciously of strong tobacco. On it, engraved in cursive script, were words commemorating my parents’ marriage: ‘From the tenants of the Lowther Estate’. In this case, their landlord’s brother – my father – was accorded the tenants’ generosity back in 1958.
This mutual respect between landlord and tenant was forged in the post-war era when the need for food had trumped all and the two sides were united in delivering the aim of self-sufficiency, bonded by lengthy tenancy contracts to encourage sufficient investment by both parties. This bond may now seem feudal, but it worked quite well.
There were antiquated contractual obligations too. Take my own tenancy contract with my cousins who own the Lowther Estates: it had clauses to clear ‘injurious weeds’ and others to preserve the soil’s long-term fertility. Selling hay and manures off the farm was expressly forbidden. In return, my landlord supplied the limewash for me to disinfect the cow byres and the ‘quick thorn’ or hawthorn whips to stop up gaps in the hedgerows; I just had to do the work and provide ‘cartage’ or pay to get the materials on farm. Now, cows are no longer kept in byres and thistles are positively welcomed to host goldfinches, which feast on their seeds.
Today, however, tenant farms, which run to three million acres (a third of England’s farmed land) are in mortal peril, and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is well aware of the issue, having this week launched a call for evidence to explore the failing relationship between tenants and landlords.
Today, looking back, the funeral of Colin Carruthers seems the beginning of a long wake for the rural culture and economy, which had once been sustained by the old feudalistic and mutual partnership, not least on the Lowther Estates, where the number of tenants has dropped 60 per cent from 56 to 29 in just two decades.
New land uses – and the threat to tenants
Across the UK, farming land is being lost to solar farms, wind turbines, new housing, land-hungry infrastructure like HS2; and to meet English, Welsh and Scottish government tree planting targets. Add to this a recent fashion for rewilding, the emergence of entirely new private markets that reward carbon capture by trees and peat plus emergence of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), a now-mandatory strategy for land managers to develop land while contributing to the recovery of nature, then it is not surprising that land prices are rising and people are talking about the “wild west” in land markets. Inevitably, fewer acres of land will be available to the tenant sector, especially in marginal stock-rearing areas like Wales, the North and West of England and much of Scotland.
“The risks to the [tenant farm] sector are real and immediate,” says George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers’ Association (TFA). He contributed last year to The Rock Review of the tenanted sector, which was chaired by the Conservative peer, Baroness Kate Rock. It aimed to secure the long-term future of tenant farming, at least in part through new government financial schemes. So far, however, the Government has pretty much sat on the Review’s 70 recommendations. Baroness Rock says there’s a “tidal wave of uncertainty,” and that during her time working on the review “too often we found an overly short-term, commercial and acerbic approach to the management of tenanted estates”.
Dunn is starker still: “The demands on the tenanted sector are increasing and we run the risk of a major loss of tenanted land in the next five to 10 years.” He explains that the area of land signed up into new tenancies has flatlined since 2003 and the length of new tenancies granted since 2011 has averaged under four years. So, for instance, if you wanted a new hedge, by the time you had a grant and planted it, you might get to enjoy one year of growth but not a flower nor a berry before your time was up. “The sector is hugely short term,” he says.
A strained relationship
That short-termism is the bitter fruit of a bond between tenant and landlord that has been fraying for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s landlords developed a visceral hatred of legally guaranteed ‘three-generation’ tenancies, as they would never have any real prospect of getting a tenant farm back in-hand, and rents were lower than market rates. Should the farm become festooned, for instance, with black plastic silage wrap flapping in the wind, the landlord would wish in vain to install a tidier tenant.
It cut both ways too as tenants’ contracts expressly forbade any activities except farming, which militated against flexibility, which farmers needed to develop as farmgate prices crashed in the face of food mountains and the stronger supermarket buying power of the 1980s.
New farm tenancies completely vanished as a result of landlords’ mistrust of these generational tenancies. Then came salvation in the shape of the new Farm Business Tenancies (FBTs), from the John Major government, which allowed short contracts and complete flexibility between the parties – you could run a funeral parlour from your farm if you wanted.
Sadly, the new flow of land onto the rental market was short-lived. In 2003, farm subsidies were unhitched from production and tied instead to the acreage of land farmed. Landlords sought to bring their land in-hand and once again the tenant farming system froze as just a trickle of new leases were granted. Tenants, then, are well used to challenges. But today they face a new cocktail of problems.
Today’s challenges
First, fertiliser prices have been driven sky high by the war in Ukraine. Even more significantly, however, post-Brexit Government agricultural policy has removed existing subsidies in favour of eco-delivery initiatives driven by doom-laden nature reports. Combined, these form what one land agent calls “the perfect storm” facing the tenant farming community.
It hasn’t escaped the notice of the tenant farming community, for example, that England’s largest current land sale of 9,500 acres for £35 million – Northumberland’s Rothbury Estate – is being touted as the “single largest ring-fenced carbon off-setting opportunity to come on the market in England for decades”. Remarkably at no point does Knight Frank’s sale brochure mention the word “food”.
Offsetting is the new process whereby a landowner and farmers can pull in carbon by tree planting, peatland restoration or by farming land regeneratively and by selling the carbon units into the market – some unregulated, some not.
This vast tract being sold by Lord Max Percy, younger son of the Duke of Northumberland, of 12 farms (nine of which are tenanted), forestry and moorland and owned by the family since 1332, is a neat metaphor for the future faced by tenant farmers.
There are four parties rumoured to be interested in a purchase. What will they want from this land, and will their new tenants be able to help deliver for them, or will they be in the way? The nature lover and badger enthusiast Brian May, guitarist of supergroup Queen, was rumoured to be interested in a purchase. I am guessing his management style might diverge somewhat from that of the Percy family – who are noted fishermen, game shots and keen farmers.
The Rothbury land sale follows a new pattern of recent land purchases for non-farming motives, particularly in Scotland, where Asos billionaire Anders Povlsen has bought 12 highland sporting estates for rewilding. They are so vast that he is now Scotland’s biggest landowner. There’s James Watt of beer label BrewDog, who bought the Cairngorm 9,500-acre Kinrara estate in 2020 for £8.8 million for peatland and woodland restoration to offset the company’s emissions by planting a vast forest. This has become such a trend that these owners are now described as ‘green lairds’.
“There’s a real risk of land being taken back in hand,” says Baroness Rock. A land agent in Cumbria told me he just paid a tenant to leave a 2,500-acre hill farm for which he used to get £17,000 a year in rent and he now nets £150,000 a year for effectively rewilding the farm on a 10-year contract. “It’s a no-brainer for my client,” he said. But so far Rock’s solutions to stop this type of practice – which include longer tenancies – have been ignored.
Yet the experience elsewhere suggests that longer tenancies are no silver bullet, and risk landlords once again refusing to offer new deals. Successive tenancy reforms in Scotland, for example, have precipitated a rapid flight of land from the sector as big estates like that owned by the Duke of Buccleuch sold off huge chunks – 8,000 acres at Langholm, for instance – and many others either sold to their tenants or kept it in hand.
“There’s a real shortage of tenancies in any shape or form, especially for new entrants,” says Doug Bell, managing director of the Scottish Tenant Farmers’ Association.
Solutions to boost the sector
Jeremy Moody, secretary of the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers (CAAV), thinks freeing up the supply of land onto the tenant market lies over the water in the Republic of Ireland, where a more liberal fiscal policy introduced in 2015 has led to a rapid rise of land let to new tenants. By 2020, nearly half a million acres had been added to the rented sector. It has been such a success that Ireland, where the landlord tenant sector was tiny, now has nearly double the amount of land leased for five years or more than the UK. The lever Ireland used was to give income tax relief on farmland let for five or more years. Moody says this could be rolled out in the UK, especially for small and medium-sized farms.
Watching closely will be Julian Taylor, 32, from South Molton, Devon, who runs a flying flock of 430 ewes on more than 10 blocks of land scattered far and wide. He is employed on a farm for four days a week. Most of his 150 acres of rented land is held on a handshake and his most secure tenancy is a two-year term from South Molton Town Council set to run out in 2024, because the Council has applied for planning permission to build houses.
As I speak to Taylor, there’s a chorus of sheep in the background and a metallic clatter from his mobile sheep pens as he speaks while he is checking his rams. “All I have ever wanted to do is farm, but my position is insecure,” he says. He represents a new class of proficient agriculturalists, not necessarily from a farming background, who have a toehold in the industry, but who spend much of their time on the road, travelling to and from their scattered rented plots.
They are desperate to get a firmer hold on the farming ladder and one of the safer rungs for young aspirants was through council-owned starter farms, but over 200,000 acres has been sold from this estate in the last 40 years and 11 per cent of its land has gone between 2010 and 2018 as cash-strapped councils have sold to raise capital. Competition to get a council farm is intense, nowhere more so than in Devon.
Taylor says: “I really need a secure tenancy which will enable me to settle down with my partner and raise a family. I’ve been the official runner up on two council farms. I’ll try once more and then call it quits.”
Baroness Rock is blunt: “It is disappointing that Defra has not taken forward any recommendations in respect of new entrants. Furthermore, there is no clear Defra policy or vision for what it wants the new entrant sector to look like.”
However, when this criticism was put to Defra, a spokesperson said: “We are already supporting the tenant farming sector and have delivered on many of the recommendations in the Rock Review, including making our Environmental Land Management schemes more accessible to tenants and working with the sector on a new code of practice to encourage more collaborative tenant-landlord relationships.
“We are also evaluating the results from our New Entrants pilot scheme which looked at how we can best support people to enter the sector and increase their opportunities to access land and finance. This included support to develop business and entrepreneurial skills, including pitching for tenancies, with around 80 per cent of participants coming from a non-farming family background.”
Be that as it may, it does feel that a way of life is coming to an end. When I was a child, growing up in a whitewashed 17th century farmstead on the fell that overlooked the Lowther Estate, my sisters and I would play with a toy farm, ‘Fir Tree Farm’. It had a neat square farmhouse, a yard with loose boxes, byres and a hay barn. There was a pond, post and rail fences and the wire stumps where the row of fir trees had broken off, which would give you a heck of a cut if you didn’t play quietly. We had endless fun arranging cattle, sheep, pigs and hens, tractors and trailers and hay bales, but that vision, accompanied by the nursery rhyme Old MacDonald Had a Farm, has gone and the chances of a tenant getting such a farm, yards and house are now few.
Additional reporting by Ben Butcher and Alex Clark
