Originally Posted by
Ollie the Optimist
So in response to the first part about being mortgage free, this is pretty much certain not to be the case. Farms will have many loans to fund buying equipment or building new grain barns etc. to keep up with modern standards and improve the farm running. The land is unlikely to be completely mortgage free so that option is not as easy as it sounds. While 50k sounds a lot, that does depend on the farm being able to grow the crops etc and no other variables coming into play. Take the Ukraine war, the price of fertizler shot up massively meaning that 50k would have been massively reduced as costs eat into income. Weather also plays a massive part, a real example here is about 3 weeks before harvest, there was a significant hail storm that caused us to lose around 40% of our rape seed that harvest.40% of the crop lost but all the cost of growing it had been spent at that point.
The point about 3 million being tax free, it sounds a lot but it isn’t. I reckon most farms will probably have around 500k-1m in machinery (combines, tractors, ploughs etc.) that’s before the big assets such as the land, house & barns. A lot more farms will be caught in this tax then treasury are forecasting.
This policy affects my family but that’s not why I’m against it, I’m against it because it’s a load of bollocks. I’ve no idea how my family afforded the boarding school fees but you have seen photos on facebook and made an assumption that we are loaded which isn’t the case. I’m not going to pretend we are poor, we aren’t. You say its just rich people moaning about tax but farmers generally are not cash rich, they’ll only be cash rich when they sell the land but given these farms have been passed down for generations, isn’t likely unless forced.