Many months before farmers found themselves on the front pages of newspapers, after protesting in Whitehall against the new government’s inheritance tax rules, we at Sky News embarked upon a project.
Most of our reports are relatively short affairs, recorded and edited for the evening news. We capture snapshots of life in households, businesses and communities around the country. But this year we undertook to do something different: to spend a year covering the story of a family farm.
We had no inkling, at the time, that farming would become a front-page story. But even back in January, 2024 was shaping up to be a critical year for the sector. This, after all, was the year the new post-Brexit regime for farm payments would come into full force. Having depended on subsidies each year for simply farming a given acreage of land, farmers were now being asked to commit to different schemes focused less on food than on environmental goals.
This was also the first full year of the new trade deals with New Zealand and Australia. The upshot of these deals is that UK farmers are now competing with two of the world’s major food exporters, who can export more into Britain than they do currently.
You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday
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On top of this, the winter that just passed was a particularly tough one, especially for arable farmers. Cold, wet and unpredictable – even more so than the usual British weather. It promised to be a challenging year for growing.
With all of this in mind, we set out to document what a year like this actually felt like for a farm – in this case Lower Drayton Farm in Staffordshire. In some respects, this mixed farm is quite typical for parts of the UK – they rear livestock and grow wheat, as well as subcontracting some of their fields to potato and carrot growers.
A look at farming reimagined
But in other respects, the two generations of the Bower family here, Ray and Richard, are doing something unusual. Seeing the precipitous falls in income from growing food in recent years, they are trying to reimagine what farming in the 21st century might look like. And in their case, that means building a play centre for children and what might be classified as “agritourism” activities alongside them.
The Bower family
The upshot is that while much of their day-to-day work is still traditional farming, an increasing share of their income comes from non-food activity. It underlines a broader point: across the country, farmers are being asked to do unfamiliar things to make ends meet. Some, like the Bowers, are embracing that change; others are struggling to adapt. But with more wet years expected ahead and more changes due in government support, the coming years could be a continuing roller coaster for British farming.
With that in mind, I’d encourage you to watch our film of this year through the lens of this farm. It is, we hope, a fascinating, nuanced insight of life on the land.
You can watch the Sky News special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News at 9pm on Friday
