Kevin Prince has wide experience of farming and rural business in Hampshire, where he lives near Andover, and across southern England as a director in the Adkin consultancy. His family also run a diversified farm with commercial lets, holiday cottages and 800 arable acres.

FOR most farmers Harvest is now home and the mostly disappointing growing season of 2024 is becoming a fading memory and being slowly replaced with tales of one of the wettest final week of September in living memory. The problems of producing a suitable seed bed for next year’s crop, when some of the field is under a foot of water, are occupying the minds of many arable farmers in the south at the moment. Traditional wisdom says that there will always be a window of good weather to get a crop in the ground, but the weather trends of recent years seem to suggest that that window could be shrinking each year.

The wet ground so early in the autumn is also a headache for livestock farmers who will be working out how much fodder and bedding is in their stores for what already looks like could be a long winter. On the roads you will see articulated lorry loads of straw being hauled from arable farmland areas to counties where there is a higher proportion of livestock so that it can be used for bedding and in some cases feed. It can be frustrating, (even more so on winding or hilly roads) to be stuck behind a fully laden load of straw, and have to contend with the blizzard of chaff that rains down on your windscreen every time the road narrows, but that load of straw is helping to produce your breakfast milk or Sunday roast and is a vital part of the farming supply chain.

The end of harvest and turning of the season always feels like a year end to me. A new school year, the start of the rugby season, the ceremonial turning on of the heating and my annual game of “hunt down the head torch” always feels to me like more of a fresh start than January does. This year we have a new government, and the autumn statement will be listened to very carefully by farmers up and down the country. Despite the public perception of fat cat farmers, the vast majority of farmers across the country are asset rich and cash poor. This leaves the whole industry very vulnerable to unintended consequences from tax changes. Many farm businesses have had to diversify away from agriculture in order to remain viable and whilst farming may remain the heart of the business, that core activity may be being subsidised by property lets or income from other activities. A tax raid aimed at one particular part of UK business could therefore potentially impact upon farming family businesses who simply do not have surplus income to spare.

There will, I am sure, be lots of anxious countryside ears listening as the Chancellor begins to speak on October 30 as we all hope that whatever tax changes are made do not, unintentionally, negatively impact rural businesses who are trying to get back on their feet after a turbulent few years. Many growers this year will be establishing non food crops under environmental schemes, which seem set to continue under the new government. However, we are yet to see any comprehensive policy approach to food production and food security, with an increasingly unstable political world and the threat of further conflicts, this is something that is desperately needed for UK farming.