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The recent announcement of changes to Inheritance Tax for family businesses have prompted much debate and protest since the budget in October. The one positive I take from it is that it has opened up more people’s eyes to how expensive it is to become a farmer, and how little you can expect to earn from it, so why do we do it?   Generational farmers have been said to be lucky to inherit wealth via a farm, and while it is a privilege to look after a farm for a generation, many farming heirs regard it as a bind...

Written by Emma Rose. There is a morning dew in the air as the sun rises, ready for another warm day. A pale blue sky surrounds the summer-green leaves of Oak, Birch, Willow, DogRose, Field Maple, Hazel and Hawthorn.  Brambles tease with fruit not quite ripe and apples and pears dangle with promises of good harvest. I take crisp breaths as I walk down the tracks to the chicken coops and wonder how my life changed so dramatically and how this is my third year of being a farmer.  Let me take you back… For most of my career, I...

 Tips and Trees It’s been a difficult winter at Rosewood, not least because the summer was so wet, then the rain came early and relentlessly over the winter months, as they did in many parts of the country this year. One thing that wet weather does is to focus one’s mind on the future and how to cope with the challenges we face. As I wrote back in 2019, the climate is changing and if the intervening five years have shown us anything it’s that the pace of change is accelerating rapidly with warmer, wetter winters coming as a direct...

‘Winter for the livestock farmer is something to be survived, a time of relentless work needing to be done, and of equally relentless expenditure’

The above passage from Roger Morgan-Grenville’s Taking Stock; A journey among cows sums up well how I’m feeling at the moment. It’s the end of May, Spring is here, the trees and hedgerows are bursting with life and the birds are nesting and the relief of finally turning out the cattle is palpable. As I reflect upon what winter does to the heart and bank balance, I’m left wondering, is it really worth going through another one?

 In 2005 English Nature (the former name of Natural England) published the paper The importance of livestock grazing for wildlife conservation, which detailed the concerns over the changes to farm support at the time which took away production subsidies and replaced them with simplified land area payments. This move meant that farmers no longer needed to produce anything from the land to receive the payment, which was made available simply to own agricultural land. It was anticipated that this would result in reduced grazing of biodiverse grasslands and the subsequent gradual decline of grassland biodiversity.