‘The Final Straw’: Reflecting on the 2024 Farmer Protests

This week and in November, farmers from across the United Kingdom gathered in London to protest changes in farm policy, impacting the Agricultural Property Relief, farm subsidies, and a whole host of other issues.

As MERL curator, a rural historian, and an anthropologist, I’m interested in finding ways to capture this moment for posterity, marking the passion and importance of this debate for our shared rural future. Yet it also speaks to me on a personal level, as someone who grew up on a farm that had been in our family for generations, which had to be sold to makes ends meet.

The beginnings of a family farm

Growing up, I quickly learned that farming is hard work. Many farmers are asset rich but cash poor. They struggle to make a living despite having big old houses overlooking verdant, affluent-looking landscapes. 

Looking back, I realise that my parents carried enormous financial fears throughout my early years, which they rarely shared with me and my siblings.  

Our family farm, just over the border into Scotland, came into my family during the life of my great grandfather, Thomas Douglas. He bought the farm when an estate was being broken up, at a time when interest rates were low, and when land was comparatively cheap. He farmed it with my great grandmother, Helen Maude, who joined him there from rural England.

As the twentieth century progressed, his successors—my grandparents, Garry and Grace—took over at the farm. But these were hard times: the ups and downs of the Second World War transformed farmwork and farming lives, and mid-century uncertainty posed new challenges of a contracting workforce, spiralling costs, the need to mechanise, and of global markets competing with homegrown producers. 

State support, and opposition

As costs continued to soar, and income began to contract, one lifeline that benefitted my grandparents was the support that emerged from the Agriculture Act of 1947. This brought in new subsidies that helped farmers to weather the various complex challenges they now faced.

Despite its benefits, the Agriculture Act was criticised for creating a generation of ‘feather-bedded’ farmers, while the wider world grappled with post-war austerity. This characterisation was widely disputed by people working in the industry. Such push-back turned to comical effect at the Great Yorkshire Show in 1953, where a giant automaton poked fun at a vision of gentleman farmers reclining on feather beds.

Despite prominent attempts to give voice to the farming community, such as the public protests that erupted in response to the Farm Price Review of 1965, there remained a growing perception that farmers were getting something for nothing, at the expense of everybody else. One MP defended their reputation to parliament, noting that it was clearly not true that ‘everybody who farms in East Anglia is a “barley baron” driving his two “Jags” and his “Merc” whenever he goes on a protest march.’ Despite these various forms of support, this negative stereotype quickly chipped away at sector confidence.

My parents—Tim and Jane—got married in 1973, moving into the farmhouse and taking over the farm business. That same year the UK joined the European Community and became part of the Europe-wide Common Agricultural Policy, a system of subsides and support designed to protect farming from external markets and to enable Europe to compete on the global stage.  

Criticisms of favouritism for farmers persisted throughout this period, as divisions between rural and urban communities seemed evermore polarised. Meanwhile, many who were opposed to getting into bed—feathered as it arguably was—with Europe began a long, slow campaign that would lead ultimately to Brexit, our 2016 decision to leave the EU. 

Rising debts

The challengers for farmers worsened throughout the 1980s. There was a period at the beginning of the decade when interest rates nudged to 17%, which meant that all the inputs required to run a successful farm business at this time such as machinery repairs, fertilizer, pesticides, animal health treatments, and farm labour, all cost considerably more.

Despite generous aid, my family’s debts continued to mount. At its worst, my parent’s business overdraft comprised about a third of the value of the farm itself. With the bank’s own charges set a few percent above base rate, my mum and dad looked on in abject horror at payments of 20% on a debt that, even by today’s standards, was eyewatering in scale.

At the end of the 1980s, my parents made the heart-wrenching decision to sell the farm. This decision wasn’t taken lightly. For them, it was a depressing and inevitable necessity. For us it was the loss of our first childhood home. In its place, they sought a smaller farm where they could downscale their ambitions and try to break even – or even make a little bit of a profit.

Farming protests

My parents moved to their new farm in the early 1990s. But, as the new Labour government swept to power 1997 on a wave of optimism for ‘Cool Britannia’, farmers soon readied themselves to take to the streets again, in London, Edinburgh, Blackpool, and elsewhere. One trigger for this was the proposed ban on hunting with dogs (which became illegal in the UK in 2004). Hunting remains an extremely divisive subject, but some rural people viewed this as an attack on their tradition. Yet for many farmers, their fundamental worries were about yet more changes to farm subsidy, heightening the risk of an already precarious and marginal farming existence.

In 1998, events included a Countryside March of 100,000 people in Hyde Park, who gathered together to highlight the seemingly city-centred politics of Tony Blair’s New Labour. They marched in their masses in wellies and flat caps to show their concern, invoking the divisive wartime image of an ‘urban jackboot’, which implied that politicians were wielding forceful powers like authoritarian leaders. This was followed in 2002 by an even larger gathering of over 400,000.

A decade later, the Museum collected a car sticker that survived from these protests, which appears to have been acquired almost by accident. And a few years after that I explored various avenues for acquiring protest memorabilia from the marches of the 1990s and early 2000s, imagining that someone somewhere must have a mouldy old placard gathering dust in a barn. My lack of success and the limited ephemera that survived highlights the degree to which the vestiges of such enormous moments of public protest can be fleeting and evasive – much like the profits of a family farm.

2024 protests

This year, farmers’ hardships returned to the political landscape, prompted by arguments about the Agricultural Property Relief tax break. Changes to this policy were announced in the government’s Autumn budget, meaning that farmland will no longer be entirely exempt from death duties, placing another potential future financial burden on many family farms.

It seems somewhat ironic that it was probably land value hikes caused by the introduction of this very policy that enabled my parents to buy themselves out of trouble by selling up their farm in the 1980s; the very asset it was designed to protect. Fortunately, they managed to balance things out on their new, smaller farm that they then worked through to a well-deserved retirement.

As a family we avoided the impact of this policy change because the precarity and stress of our family’s farming experience had already been enough to put me and all my siblings off the idea of a career in farming in the first place. When my parents came to retire, they sold up and their remaining assets were subject to other forms of taxation.

One object we were able to collect from this year’s protest was a protest placard made and carried in London by the hill farmer and writer Helen Rebanks, about which she spoke eloquently on Farming Today. The placard celebrates and foregrounds her desire to speak up for the life that she and her farmer-writer husband James are battling to maintain in the Cumbrian hills.  He has also written passionately about some of the very complex issues at play in this current argument.

Yet in Helen and James’ case, we can add to this another dimension. Through their environmentally sensitive approach to landscape recovery, they have become outspoken advocates for a farming future that works with nature. Through their impassioned writings and prominent advocacy, they offer a slightly different direction for farm protests and debates, one that is less concerned with polarising ideas about feather-beddedness or urban jackboots, pitting nature-lover or land activist against farmer, but about a collaborative future where we all share in the benefits of a world that supports those who are closest to the landscapes we love and cherish.

Farming futures

In many ways, Helen and James’ placard encapsulates the family values, struggles, and love of land, culture, and community that underpin my own family’s ups and downs, grown through many years in draughty farmhouses, wearing hand-me-down clothes, and helping on the farm. This year, these feelings have resurfaced as my parents looked to downsize once again.

This cuts to the heart of the tension. The rustic life is romantic and offers a potent historical pull. Yet it is also a world of financial difficulty, precarity, and uncertainty, lacking that very sense of fixity and continuity with which it is almost always characterised.

Whether you feel strongly that tax and subsidy reforms are a vital step towards land equity, that they will destroy small farm businesses, or that they will have little impact on the sector anyway, change is undeniably on the horizon. Farmers, nature advocates, politicians, and the rest of us need to work together to find a better way forward. Otherwise, it seems highly likely that the Museum will find itself with plenty opportunities to acquire farm protest and also nature advocacy ephemera in the future.

As a final afterthought, from a farm boy who once pedalled keenly on his own toy tractor: we’re keen to be in touch with anyone who was involved in organising the pedal tractor element of the London protests. One of those vehicles would make an excellent addition to the rich history of farm toys that we exhibit and care for here at The MERL. We’d also love to collect a placard or a banner from Restore Nature Now protests held in London back in June of this year. And we are keen to thank Helen Rebanks, and the generous folks who sent us their protest photographs. Thank you for being there!