The fate of Britain’s tenant farmers Can they survive the rural revolution?

On a clear day in February, Patrick Greed takes me to the brow of a hill overlooking what used to be his farm. Around us stretches the green countryside of Devon’s Killerton estate, radiant in the winter sun. Nestled in a fold in the landscape, we can see the farmhouse where Greed lived with his family for much of his life. At one time, the hillsides nearby were carpeted in golden wheat; Greed has images to prove it, which he shows me with evident pride. Now though, those same fields are covered in a stubble of plastic cylinders. Greed’s former landlord, the National Trust, is planting trees across swathes of Killerton.

“That’s Grade One arable land,” states Greed, a quietly determined man in his mid-60s. “That land will be out of production now for at least 50 to 70 years. If there’s a political upheaval, it’ll take a lot of time and money to get it producing food again.” The fate of his old farm speaks to wider changes affecting British agriculture. The same ranks of plastic-wrapped saplings I saw at Killerton, planted mainly to remove carbon from the atmosphere, have recently appeared on farmland near my home in Sussex, and on countless other agricultural landscapes across Britain.

Attention has lately focused on the plight of family-owned farms, potential victims of Labour’s inheritance tax policies, but less understood are the struggles of tenant farmers such as Greed. Renting their fields and pastures from landowners, tenant farmers currently manage about a third of England’s farmland, but they are now scrabbling to adapt to a rural economy that is increasingly focused on the environment. This green turn heralds a rural revolution, one with consequences not just for farmers, but also for Britain’s food security.

At Killerton and elsewhere, the National Trust is playing a major role. Established in 1895 to preserve places of natural and historic significance, the charity has more than 1,300 tenant farmers on its enormous holdings. Over the last decade, however, it has created 25,000 hectares of nature-rich landscape on its estate, and in January it announced that over the next decade it would do 10 times more, committing an area larger than Greater London to natural habitats. Promoting these plans, Director-General Hillary McGrady said that “nature is declining before our eyes and climate change is threatening homes and habitats on a colossal scale”. The Trust is planting almost half a million trees this winter alone.

As for Greed, his tensions with the charity began around 2018, when it asked him to massively reduce his cattle herd, suggesting that he diversify his business beyond farming. He refused. “They expect tenants to work for bugger all, to be land managers,” he says. “You couldn’t earn a living out of it.” Then, in 2022, when his contract on 150 acres of river meadows came up for renewal, the Trust took them back for rewilding. Like the sight of high-quality arable land “gone into trees”, Greed finds the scrubby state of his rewilded meadows offensive. “A bloody mess,” he calls it. The following year, after establishing that his children didn’t want to succeed him on the farm, he accepted a “golden handshake” to give up his remaining tenancy.

Greed has done well out of farming, having started in the Eighties. But the land he leased won’t be available for the next generation of tenant farmers. Nor, he emphasises, will it be there to feed Britain’s next generation of people. As Greed puts it: “It was a very productive farm that would produce basically enough food for a small town. And it’s gone.” At least he got out clean. Kevin Bateman, a Devon land agent, told me of tenants being squeezed out by environmental schemes. “When you see farmers being kicked out of their homes because their tenancies aren’t being renewed, it’s difficult to watch,” he explains. “You’re not just taking away his farm, you’re taking away his livelihood, and you’re taking away his home.”

It’s a story that goes much further than the National Trust. In 2021, Britain left the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which had long provided the bloc’s framework for farming subsidies. As part of Boris Johnson’s “green industrial revolution”, the Conservatives moved to an approach of “public money for public goods”. Farmers and landowners can now receive funds for sustainable farming and rewilding, alongside various other forms of carbon capture and nature restoration. The current Labour government is continuing this strategy, which aims to create some 2,000 square miles of wildlife-friendly habitat, while planting millions of trees.

Yet a 2022 review by Kate Rock, a Conservative peer, found that the new policies were badly designed for tenant farmers. Since the Nineties, when more flexible contracts were introduced to encourage landowners to rent their land, shorter tenancies have proliferated, often lasting less than five years. This prevents farmers from entering long-term environmental schemes. Rock told me that the government also mistakenly expects tenant farmers to diversify into areas like eco-tourism, which their agreements often don’t allow for. All of this means that, while farmers are being told to forgo earnings by farming less intensively, they are unable to make up for it by other means, and so are seeing their businesses become unviable.

Labour’s attempt to extract more inheritance tax from farmland risks making things even worse. “There will be a huge impact on the tenanted sector,” says Rock, who has already heard evidence of tenants facing eviction because their landlords are selling land to pay the tax. All the while, there is growing competition for rural land, including from solar and wind energy, housing estates, and private biodiversity schemes that help firms offset their environmental impact. Ten major solar farms, covering over 24,000 acres of countryside, are currently planned for the east of England alone.

Some will say good riddance to agriculture. As Alun Howkins described in his 2003 book The Death of Rural England, the second half of the 20th century saw the public becoming disenchanted with modern farming. Comforting visions of a bucolic countryside were ruined by the evolution of farming into a large-scale, scientifically-enhanced, mechanised industry, with its artificial fertilisers, imported feedstuffs, huge unbroken fields and specially bred crops and animals. “The countryside vanishes under a top-dressing of chemicals,” wrote J.G. Ballard in 1971. Especially sinister were the pesticides that have helped to decimate Britain’s bird life (farmers insist that the most nasty substances are no longer used). By the turn of the century, between outbreaks of mad cow disease and foot and mouth, farming was coming to be seen as a threat to the rural world rather than its soul.

These sentiments matter because British agriculture lacks other sources of power. The country has not been self-sufficient in food since before the Industrial Revolution. Its population is overwhelmingly urban and does not seem to care very much where its food comes from, so long as it is cheap. In 2022, the UK spent just 8.5% of its consumer expenditure on food, one of the lowest proportions on earth. At the same time, farming carries little economic clout even in rural areas, where tourism and leisure make a much larger contribution. A symbolic moment came in 2001, when New Labour renamed the Ministry of Agriculture as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Its minister, Margaret Beckett, warned farmers that “there is no long-term future for an industry which cannot develop in line with market forces”. Having little emotional purchase on the public, Britain’s farmers cannot match the political weight of their counterparts in France or the Netherlands, where attempts to impose environmental regulations have provoked serious backlash.

The impetus towards nature restoration should be welcomed in principle, but it is short-sighted to sacrifice productive farmland for this goal. History, as well as the growing instability of global politics today, suggest that we should take Greed’s concerns about food security seriously. At the start of the Second World War, Britain had to frantically scale up its domestic agriculture to ensure its population could be fed, an experience that underpinned state support for agriculture in the decades that followed. Today though, the country is just 62% self-sufficient, according to the government, though this varies depending on the type of nutrition. Overall, the food policy specialist Tim Lang says Britain has reverted to its “long tradition of assuming others will feed us”. Lang believes the country is now in a similar position to the late Thirties, when “the evidence of a coming food security crisis was as plain as a pikestaff” — and yet was ignored until war broke out. And even then, the Royal Navy was clearly more capable of defending seaborne supply lines in 1940 than it is now.

For the farmers I spoke to, though, questionable land use decisions were only the most obvious cases of the incompetence they associate with recent environmental policies. Greed — who describes rewilding as “a fad” and is sceptical of labels like “sustainable” farming — can recite countless examples of misjudged interventions. He speaks of fields wrongly fenced; botched wetland restorations that damaged insect populations; ecosystems wrecked by prohibitions against culling; and pesticide bans that force farmers to use more destructive chemicals. There is definitely a sense in parts of rural Britain that those reshaping the countryside are ideologically hostile to agriculture, regarding it as inherently destructive, and to the way of life that has traditionally accompanied it. It was pointed out to me that Killerton and Somerset’s Holnicote estate were gifted to the National Trust in the Forties with a request to conserve not just nature, but farming and hunting. Yet the latter has been banned and the former is being marginalised.

Not that common ground is impossible. Farmers emphasise that they have their own methods of supporting wildlife, making use of less productive verges and corners. Kevin Bateman acknowledges that “there are bad farmers out there, who are polluting and doing the wrong thing”, but in general, he says, there ought to be agreement on the principle to “get the land that should be farmed, farmed well; get the more marginal land working well for the environment”. The tragedy of tenant farmers being evicted is that “most of them would say, ‘we’re quite happy to do 85% of what you want.’ But they want 100% or nothing.”

A common criticism of current rural policies, including from Parliament’s own environment committee, is that they lack strategic coherence. Since the general goal is to balance food security with conservation, the solution surely involves giving tenant farmers a more secure role, and more of a voice, in the new countryside. There is broad agreement, for instance, that longer tenancies can help to align the interests of farmers with those of environmental schemes, since they encourage more sustainable use of the land. As Greed puts it, short tenancies tempt farmers “to rape the land for all they can, because they’re giving it back in a few years,” whereas longer contracts mean that “you can invest for the next generation”. Kate Rock has proposed tying this in with the inheritance tax issue, by giving exemptions to landlords who let for longer periods.

This is not to say that farmers should get everything they want. There are clearly cases, from nitrate pollution to habitat destruction, where agricultural productivity can come into tension with a flourishing natural world. Food security would arguably be improved by farming fewer animals, which consume about a third of the country’s grain production, especially in upland areas where they strip the landscape and are often unprofitable in any case. By the same token, though, we should not be giving up good farmland for development, and certainly not for solar panels which could be installed on buildings. More generally, acknowledging that farmers have a stake in rural life — and unmatched knowledge of the places they farm — would be a good antidote to clumsy top-down schemes.

But the first priority for the tenanted sector should be ensuring that there are still opportunities for new farmers to come through. Greed says of his own children, rather ruefully, that they “saw me working seven days a week and thought, no thanks”. Farming has always been hard work, but the current wave of environmental thinking risks burdening the vocation with new layers of uncertainty and cultural stigma. It cannot be in the interests of the countryside to drive away the people with first-hand knowledge of it, the people most committed to living and working there.

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