Who wants to be a Heartbroken Millionaire?

Being a farmer on X in the last few weeks has been in equal measures both interesting and exasperating. I am in no way one of these popular young farming influencers. On the contrary, I’m knocking 50 and have taken exactly 3 selfies, ever (and didn’t share any) I’m a 6th generation bumpkin. I’ve been on X (formally Twitter) for 15 years, over which time I’ve gathered over 7k followers, numbers usually boosting after I’ve posted a picture of a cute but usually doomed lamb or a video of it snowing across the fells and submerging my stoical Swaledale ewes. I like to tweet (or post as we do now) and have recently been replied to with a growing frequency, phrases like ‘pay your taxes!’ and ‘won’t somebody think of the millionaire landowners?!’ I received this response only this week, “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry. Either way, you’ll own an asset worth millions, or you’ll sell, and have millions in cash. Hard life, eh?” Well yes, it is a hard life, but here’s why.

I do pay tax! 

The problem is I do pay my taxes, all of them. I ridiculously have two full time jobs (I’m also a dental technician) so I think I probably pay more tax than most. Of course, as a farm, we can claim VAT back on certain things, but we still pay the value of the item. It was JFK who said “The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” Not much has changed, and he died in 1963! Secondly, I’m not a millionaire by any stretch. I can show you my bank balance if you want. Like most ‘working people’ I struggle to save. My utility bills are as high as anyone else’s and you should see my 1990s kitchen! I desperately wish I could afford to renew it.

When you see what you would regard as a wealthy farmer, he/she is probably up to their eyeballs in debt. It’s well reported that the inputs of agriculture far outweigh the returns, so your only hope of an outwardly opulent lifestyle is to juggle credit cards and loans. The subsidies have all but disappeared. Personally I’ve tried to avoid debt and consequently haven’t been on a foreign holiday since 2008.

I’m very lucky indeed

Your supposed ‘millions’ are tied up in your land, machinery and livestock. Removing any portion of these will diminish your ability to make your meagre income. It sounds nuts, I get that. So why on earth do we continue?! Well, if you can be bothered, go and look at my Instagram page. There you will clearly see how much I love what I do. The landscape, the animals, the wildlife. I’m very lucky indeed. But it all comes with a serious caveat, that you work your metaphorical nuts off to keep it, to protect it and to enhance it for the future.

The rhetoric on X, coming thick and fast from those who are so pleased that the Tory government was toppled, can not concede that their beloved new leaders might very well be stuffing up as exquisitely as their predecessors, is relentlessly going round in circles. The oft repeated James O’Brien answer, “just sell some land” closes the circular argument completely with no openings at all for any sympathy of our situation. The imagined neatly divided up corner pockets of lawn that can be sold to the keen gardener next door or ironically to a local millionaire who’s daughter wants a horse paddock, are manifestations in their collective urban brains. They don’t exist. Most farms are completely surrounded by other farms on every boundary and the bloke next door is in the same boat as you are, or same tractor for this analogy.

It’s a love affair

What the loud mouths who attack me online fail to appreciate is the fact that yes, we are millionaires of a kind, but really only the sort who are lucky in love. The value of the land is only high because of the demand placed on it by those who wish to exploit it for their own nefarious benefit, whether it be the virtuous quest for carbon sequestration, clean energy solar and wind, or concrete and tarmac based developments. They just don’t love the land like we do. They don’t see the beauty, the nature, the wildlife. But like with any love affair, it feels likely I am soon to be completely heartbroken if it is taken away from me.

My personal situation with IHT is complicated. My father is 81 and we have been warned by our land agent that we will most likely fall into the bracket of those affected. This is looming and it’s frightening. Yes I could give it up and probably afford a nice home in a village (this is one of the options frequently offered to me by my new friends on X) But the prospect of my farm being ravaged for it’s lucrative attributes by those who would rape it without a thought for the fragile ecology of the ancient wood or complex diversity of the hedgerows and ditches, is mortifying. And even worse, if possible, the abrupt end of essential food production on this land. Roll this scenario out across the country and you rapidly lose not only the wildlife havens but also our nation’s food security. Too strong? Well I’m a passionate woman! So passionate in fact I travelled down to London last month, all the way from Durham, to stand with my fellow farmers outside Whitehall. I even wore a “Starmer the Farmer Harmer” hoodie. I did my bit that day, but there’s so much more to do. I think articulating our situation on platforms like X is vital in this battle we’ve found ourselves fighting. Call me a rich bitch farmer all you like, I won’t stop sharing my 280 characters.