It's home and we're custodians ...it's also a poisoned chalice

A Christmas message to the Chancellor from another farming family facing the fallout from Rachel Reeves' toxic autumn Budget

- Jane Warren

JERRY Flake points out a tractor's giant rear wheel as he hoists a hay bale the size of a Ford Focus into position - it's a perhaps surprising example of the knife-edge on which many of the country's 185,000 family-run farms now find themselves.

An already perilous situation that has worsened since Chancellor Rachel Reeves' tax-raising autumn Budget.

"Of course, those large tyres look robust but we're farming with flint in the soil here, so we're lucky if a tyre like that lasts a single season," says Jerry, 67.

At a hefty £1,500 a pop, the frequent tyre replacements add to his family's mounting bills. And there are six tractors on their 1,000-acre arable, sheep and beef business within the South Downs National Park.

But the attractive rolling landscape can be expensively deceptive.

For here, "England's green and pleasant land" is of rather poorer quality.

Delicate

Jerry adds: "The soil here is less than 6in deep and beneath that is unforgiving chalk." So that porous bedrock makes ploughing a delicate process.

His wife Jenny then sums up the situation for the holding, which has been in the same family since 1901: "Quite simply, the farm is not profitable."

Her childless brother Trevor Passmore died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 67, leaving the farm in two shares to Jenny and to his nephew Andrew.

Jenny, now 70, continues: "Andrew was aged 22, so it was a very big decision for him to make.

"But he had always wanted to farm and lambed his first lamb when he was three.

Someone said, 'Should that child be there?' I looked around, and there was Andrew lambing a ewe.' For Andrew, the farm was a surprise inheritance which also came with the debts of previous generations, that are still being carefully managed.

He calls it "a poisoned chalice. It's home and we are the custodians of it, but as the farmer you are at the bottom of the list.