The Farmers Who Won’t Give Up | UK Column Interviews

0:00Welcome to very hardworking farmers, British farmers, to this interview. I've got Jeff Pomeroy from Devon and also Ben Veer from Devon. We met at the protest, I know I'd met you before, we had a chat at the protest and the protest wasn't really, it didn't work out exactly the way it was meant to. So can you just elaborate on that, you two? Well, basically we had been in discussions with the Met Police for over a month and we had had quite a few negotiations and come to several agreements, really. We're just going to allow us to go in and protest and make a reasonable statement that sort of would have got some points across and perhaps around lead a little bit of, let's say, general

1:06public support and the logistics are incredibly long-winded and difficult to get tractors from all around the country into London. So lots of pre-preparation, lots of machinery loaded onto low, load of lorries which needed to be pre-booked and paid for and lots of actual tractors on roads that had to sort of travel for several hours. So they, some of them are left or are certainly committed and then last minute we were told by the Met Police late afternoon the day before that it was not to go ahead and we were not allowed to bring any tractors or in fact farm vehicles into the centre of London, which split the whole movement pretty much right down the middle because half the farmers did sort of not come, they were scared off and half of the farmers, some of which were fully committed

2:06and had spent money and others, it gave them even more resolve to go in because they were quite upset that why the farmers protest should be shut down when there were protests almost every day in London. Exactly. So, and do you feel that it was really an assault yet another assault on the farmers because actually it was meant to divide and conquer? Yeah, definitely, I think there was a certain element of that. It may even have been a tactic to try to certainly divide and conquer but also to perhaps rile up the farmers a little bit the ones that were, you know, because there was a certain amount of animosity if you like towards the idea that it should be cancelled last minute, it was very unfair and it could have well been a tactic that they used on purpose because they had plenty of time to actually say, you know, a week before they could have said no, it's not going to, it's not going to go ahead. Of course, and Ben, how is it

3:10for you that day? I mean, it must have been a big shock really when they suddenly pulled the rug from underneath you and said, no, you're not coming into Whitehall. I can't speak for them but there was, you know, several, several individuals up country there who put in a lot of time and, you know, Jeff and I, we both, we both know them and communicated with them. They put in a lot of time in organizing where these people were going to have their tractors delivered to and how they were going to set off and just a coordination of the thing takes a lot of time, especially because, apologies, especially because a lot of these guys, as Jeff has said, they have to travel a long distance and that takes time. It's not something that can be turned off at the drop of a hat. So when you get that call last minute, you know, there's a common word of tractors coming down from Yorkshire who they were already on the road, they're not going to stop halfway down and turn around sort of thing. It's just not in their nature. Absolutely. And what was so awful is that I remember, I mean, I did interview quite a lot of farmers that day and one of them,

4:13a particular farmer from Dorset, had brought his tractor up and he was told he couldn't take it into white wool. So he parked it up near the National Gallery and later on I saw him being arrested and the thing being put on a low loader. So they were impounding tractors at great cost to the farmers. Having, you know, made that decision themselves, you would have thought that they wouldn't be so hard on them, wouldn't you? But no, they find them, they arrested them, they impounded their tractors. I just thought it was absolutely off-scale unfair, you know, really, really unfair. It certainly highlighted quite an interesting lack of unity for one of a better description inside the Metropolitan Police because the phrase of the left hand, not talking to the right, was never more apparent than that day. You know, there were individuals who were threatened with arrest or even having vehicles impounded if they didn't move the vehicle,

5:15having only just been told by a separate officer to leave their vehicle there and walk away, sort of thing. So the disjointed nature of it, which I'm sure, you know, organizationally from their point of view, was because of the last minute nature of it. You know, the lack of the lack of time between the decision and the event didn't just affect us as the protesters. It also affects, you know, the actual officers on the ground. So they're put in a position where it's very difficult to manage a situation that could have completely been avoided. And obviously, you know, you were there. It was budget day. You know, we were waiting for Rachel Reeves to give us the information about the budget. And, you know, really, most of the farmers that were there were really the worst thing that they were dealing with was inheritance tax. I know the farmers have a lot of challenges. So can you just sort of put it into perspective about which ones are the worst? And I think it is in inheritance tax if I'm right.

6:18Yeah, what are the challenges at the moment for the farmers? Yes, certainly, as you've rightly touched, there are a multitude of issues at the moment which we can touch on stemming from subsidy changes and market issues. But the reason for the large uptaken protests and the, you know, the wider engagement of the Ag community is the changes to inheritance tax. So just as an example, I'm just going to kind of run through a super pretty example. But all of the figures that I'm used are pulled from the government's website. So this is information that is available to the EXJECA when they've created these tax laws because it's their information. So the pre-change, the way it would have worked, is working farm. You have your husband and wife, for example, maybe the wife's passed away, is the husband left. He passes the farm onto his children when he passes away. And as it's a working

7:24farm, agricultural property relief provides a 100% relief from inheritance tax because for working asset, that covers your land and your buildings. And then business property relief, which is BPR, that would have covered the working assets of the farm, such as livestock or machinery or grain in stores, things to that effect. The changes now result in this bizarre split between what the government's own data suggests and what they are claiming. So if we use their .gov figures, an average farm size in the UK, this is UK-wide based across livestock and arable, is 87 hectares, round about 215 acres, which at an average UK-wide land price of 8,900 gives an average farm value.

8:24The government figures again, 1.9 million. So to work that through as a return on capital investment, so how much money that an average farm would actually produce, it runs depending on the year, anywhere between 0.1.2%, which is a pretty dire compared to other businesses, but that's kind of the way it is. If you're 1.9 million there, apologies, just includes land and buildings. So we'll set aside the vehicles and the livestock for a moment. After reliefs, you are, so the average farm here is attempting to fund a tax bill that is potentially at three to four times its return, which even over a 10-year period is clearly not viable.

9:33So this claim from the exchequer that only a minority of farms will be affected, or it's only going to, the number seems to change on how many they claim will actually be affected per year, seems wildly unlikely when their own average figures suggest otherwise, which I think is the crux of why there's so much pressure and sentiment building in the rural community, because the actual on the ground experience of all these people is so vastly different from what's being being claimed by the state. So there's a big disconnect there that the state is saying one thing, and the reality is that farmers are impoverished actually. It sounds like it's, yeah, it's going to completely destroy farming. And the thing is that people do have this perception, all the farmers, all their, you know, their rich, their landowners. It's absolute rubbish. I mean,

10:35all farmers are isolated too. They said, you know, we're in debt. We've got machinery, we're still paying for, you know, that the land, you know, when you have bad weather, you don't get the yields, all this kind of thing. So it is a fantasy that what farmers are rich. And that's a lot of the arguments. I'll point out that protesting again, those rich farmers, it's not true, is it? I just looked it up for clarification, but so the death for figures, which is the government department for for farming a rural affairs, their farm business, they gives a return on capital employed for the 23, 24 financial year of a minus. So that means if you had capital employed of two million, for example, and I can't do that maths quickly and off the top of my head up to my to my shame, but you're not, you're making no profit. So the average return on capital invested for the 23, 24 financial year was a negative. Basically farmers, and for

11:38I would say probably for the last decade, maybe even 20 years, they always borrow the maximum amount they can, because that's their way of running their business and expanding, you know, numbers, just basically to sort of keep the head, keep the heads above water. And so they will actually, you know, the bankones for the farm, because they've basically put the deeds in the borders as much as they can. On top of that, the big shiny tractors, they don't buy going and buy them outright, they're basically on purchase hire or some sort of agreement. And because, you know, most farmers have got things to sell throughout the months or seasons, then, you know, they're just making monthly payments on those. And farmers have had to go back to the bank. They've had to pay for re-evaluations because land has gone up significantly over the last decade or so. Many farmers have had re-evaluations done so that they could borrow a little bit more.

12:40And that's how they've been surviving because we've been at this sort of zero state for quite a while now. What I've noticed is that, I mean, I've looked at the sustainable farming incentive documents. And it looks so, unless you diversify and move away from actually producing food, you know, make any money, you're expected to, you know, put renewables on your land, you know, whether it's solar farms, wind farms, whatever it is, and create businesses on your land, whether it's herbal lays or I don't know, some people have gone into forest schools and all sorts of things that aren't about food production. So have you seen that amongst your farming community? Smaller farms, especially the some of the monoculture farms that they're too big to do that kind of thing, but lots of the ones that are really struggling have had to sort of diversify in different ways, yeah, sure. And do they get their subsidies taken away if they don't diversify?

13:43Like, was that one of the things or was it, were they, was it just that they had to stop? In a sense, yes, it's a slightly more, what they've done is quite nuanced. So sort of since the since the end of the war, the second world war, the subsidy program has been around in one forward or another, originally it came into promote production to bolster domestic food supply, and then it went through various changes, eventually kind of the year exactly, but after rationing and after the production spike had been encouraged, it then became a program to keep the domestic food price suppressed for the population to allow the kind of economy to grow and consumerism to become lousy at a foster because that average household was then spending less money on food. That subsidy program sometime around the turn of the century, I'm not exactly sure

14:48of the year, it's to do with the the European Union, that the central agricultural policy is, is them when this green element started to sneak in, and initially it wasn't quite as a vert as it was now, it was just in the form of leaving what they called set aside at the time. So a portion of your field, I believe it was six meters, Jeff Krentman from wrong, it was a six meter strip around fields that would be left for wilding purposes basically, and that existed for a number of years up until Brexit and then various transition phases of schemes, which led to as you've touched on what we have now, it's called the sustainable farming incentive, and exactly that, it's incentive, so they're structured in such a way that it is optional. However, the state with the other hand has created an environment where it is very difficult to be a financially viable farm,

15:54strictly on food production terms, so although it's not overt, you are in a situation as an ag business where in all likelihood you do need to participate in some form of scheme, just to keep your cash flow basically, to keep your cash flow and to keep your head above mortar, because it's not as simple as being able to purely make money for food production, which is a bizarre sentence to say. It is, it is really bizarre, because what happens to food security if there's no food being produced? So this appears to be a concerted effort by our government to destroy the food production. And I mean, we know that they've got ideas about vertical farming, super farms, run by robotics, all of that kind of thing. Do you think that this is a way of getting rid of our farmers in order to bring that agenda in? Very much so, yeah, I think it's, of course, the ones

16:59that are already, let's say super farms, are not super farms, but they're mono-cultures of farms, so they could be, they could have a seven or eight hundred cows or they're committed to two thousand acres of wheat or, you know, cereals. They've got all the machinery and all the setup to do that, and they can't get out of it. They're in a position now where they're committed 100%, so they're very easy to manipulate and control, actually. And the volume means they can, they survive off of small margins, because you've got that massive turnover. But, you know, this is, this is where we've gone wrong over the last 70, 80 years, where a farm might be only 100 acres, but it would be mixed, and a farmer would rotate his crops, he would have more than one kind of livestock, and then if markets fluctuated, he won't say, oh dear, the, you know, the land market is terrible. Thank goodness that the milk price is still okay, because I can still milk

18:00my 40 cows. It all worked very well in harmony together, because one complements the other as well, and as soon as you've gone out of that and into mono-culture, your challenges are, are very different, because you have to get it right every time. You've got, you know, disease issues which build up and can be devastating in livestock or in cereals, and then you have to deal with all of that. So the rotation is kind of gone, the pleasure has gone out of farming, I think massively. If I could just round back to the subsidised food side of it just quickly, because I think it's really important that the general public, then the British, and probably it's the same through Europe, but certainly in Britain, we have had really cheap food for a very long time, and that's because the government has subsidised that food. Now it's been subsidised by giving farmers

19:01incentives to produce food, or byying up that, you know, the lack of income with some form of subsidy to keep us doing what we're doing. So that gets passed on, and it's, it's quite odd to think that if you go to countries that are down on the equator that can grow food all year round, it's, you know, very fertile soils, and you would expect them to be, you know, basically having really cheap food. I've got some figures that I've just taken straight off the internet, which for instance currently Indonesia spends 28% of their of their pay packet on food, Thailand spends 35% of their pay packet on food, Vietnam spends 70% of their pay packet on food, and currently the UK is 11.2, and that's risen sharply over the last

20:03couple of years with inflation, but it's still extremely well subsidised. So I think there's going to have to be a shift in understanding a priority. Farmers do not want subsidies. Farmers do not want handouts. They basically want a fair price for their food, and to be able to stand alone as a business. We don't want government support. We should, we should not be in a situation at all. To jump off of that, Jeff, the other thing to remember, as you just touched on, the food price in this country has risen sharply, and although still a low percentage of the average pay packet, that increase is not being seen on farm yet. It is starting to trickle in it in some beef and lamb's act as I accept, but as a wider picture, a broader thing, that increase is all disappearing into this large bloated middle man of the supermarket sector, and it's all very unsure where

21:04a lot of this stuff goes. You end up with supermarkets taking a fairly inordinate some percentage of food price, and yet still being able to sell New Zealand lamb discounted for 10 pants on the kilo, and have seen things like this. So there is something fundamentally wrong with the food structure in this country, and it's resulting in neither end of the chain getting a good deal, neither the producer or the consumer. That's true. Just a quick, another figure to give an example. I've just looked it up again today. The basic milk price retail out of the supermarket today is £1.5 per litre. So that's a basic milk, it's nothing special, it's just a standard pasteurised litre. The supermarkets basically have been dropping their prices, certainly the processes have, which will be passed on to the supermarkets, and there are predictions now that

22:10in certainly one buyer of fresh milk, will be paying the farmers £31 per litre for that milk in January of 2026. Now somewhere there's £70 gone. Bear in mind that the farmer has had to keep all those cows run a full business, and he's got to try and make a profit out of the £31 and the middleman, if you like, and the retailers will have that milk in their possession for 24 to 48 hours and be able to treble the price. So farmers are being ransomed really and have been for quite a while. It seems like almost like a controlled demolition of farming across the nation really, and the thing is that I remember covering on UK column a while ago, that

23:10Dyson bloke, James Dyson, with his vertical farms, and it looked horrible. I mean, you can imagine that he was growing strawberries under artificial light and nutrients, it was all kind of like a bit like hydroponics or something, and you just think that those will be tasteless, those will be absolutely horrible to eat. So the quality of food that they intend for us, and I have looked at the Sainsbury's future of food report, and I'm sure you've seen that. It's also off the scale kind of technocratic and awful. You can't imagine that the food will be nutritious at all. So do you agree on that one? Yes, exactly. I mean, both plants and livestock. Fundamentally, it's a question about the nature of things and how humans interact with the natural world, and I think it's very difficult sometimes to have conversations like this without

24:13coming across as some kind of hippie, but fundamentally the plants and animals interact with their environment and the natural world in often incredibly minute nuanced ways, which although perhaps modern science understands a vast deal of things about animals, hormones, and such, there are going to be things that are just too subtle and too nuanced to be able to replicate in organically, and that should be end of it, so to speak. The livestock that we're here in Devon, grass-fed beef, grass-fed milk, it's to be fine, it's the best. You'll not get better because it's what the animal is, it's preferred sorts, it's what it's for, it's what they do best on, they grow the best, they produce the best food, produce the best product at the end of it, and that's not something you'll be able to replicate in organically.

25:16And sometimes nature works in harmony, it all works, as you said, it all works in symbionthus with the animals on the land and the whole nutrients of the land working with the animals, and it's funny, I remember Jeff telling me a story about these sites of scientific interest, you know, and that a field was blocked off by the, I think it was the environment agency, said, oh no, there's some kind of little spider or something that needs to be protected in this, in this, and you know, the minute you took the animals off the land, spider disappeared anyway, because the spider was actually enjoying wing around the animals, so it sometimes it doesn't work, that all these draconian measures that they put in are sometimes not working in either the human or nature's or the animals benefit, I mean, it's all, no, it's all exactly right, and the other

26:17thing to remember specifically with the United Kingdom and specifically with England, England is for all intents and purposes a managed environment, you know, that what we see in the English countryside is the product of English agriculture, how that has happened over the past centuries has created that environment and should continue to maintain it in the same way, because it's, it's the best permutation of it, how that exists now is the best way of managing that interaction between agriculture and nature. So what we've established is that there's, there seems to be an attack on farmers by our own government to destroy it, to bring in this whole technocratic agenda, which they've got, they think they can run it far more efficiently and smoothly and feed all the people well, and we know that that won't be the case, and that we, and most people don't want this stuff that they're offering to be honest, most people want

27:18grass-fed beef, and we know that there's a big thing about phasing out beef and dairy by, by 2049, we know that, that's, you know, the, the, the government have been talking about that for a long time, there's this big push towards veganism or vegetarianism, you know, we're getting all the fate meat, because Bill Gates has, and all the, all the, all the big boys have invested in all these horrible fate meat products, and so we know that this, this is, this is an agenda that they want to push. So this leaves the farmers with no recourse but to protest and to, to make their voices heard. So what challenges have you had actually with organising these protests, because I'm sure you've had some? Well, basically, farmers were unhappy and they did start to talk to each other, and then sort of a grassroots movement from our end started actually down in Devon, but, but, but, pretty quickly, other groups sort of formed in different parts of the country,

28:22but in particular, we've noticed that first of all farmers themselves are very independent, they're fiercely independent, actually, and so they have to make snap decisions every day, they have to be sort of a jack of all trades and master of none, quite often a bit of a plumber, a bit of a vet, a bit of a mechanic, everything. So they, they're self-reliant, and when you try to get them to come together, they don't just disagree, they're fiercely disagree, but we did have a common goal, and that general to quite a, quite a few farmers together, and we found out after a, a few attempts at doing some protests and, and making some, some action happen, that it wasn't going the way that we would like it to, and we, we basically found out that we were, we had been infiltrated and were being steered, either to sort of invite or, or basically to shut

29:28down any good ideas, if you like, almost like a sort of a control to keep a, keep a lid on, on, on us really getting together. And so it's been very frustrating because we've already got enough going on, we're fighting for our very lives, actually, or livelihoods, and then to find that there are people out there that will sabotage a, a honest movement from honest farmers, was a real shock to a lot of people. However, we are regrouping and re-rallying with a little bit more resolve and a little bit more understanding, or let's say, farmers can be also quite trusting, but we've, we've learned a lot in the last 12 months, let's say. So, let's see what happens next year, it's not going to be quite so quiet, I'd say. Good, good, I'm really pleased to hear that, because I mean, I must admit, when I was, when I was interviewing farmers down at the protest,

30:33and I spoke to quite a few of them, and there was one quite elderly farmer, and, and he was so lovely, and he said, you know, it would be better off if I, if I wasn't here, if I actually took myself off quietly and died, because, you know, my family farm will be, will be lost if, if I don't die before April, for instance. And, have you, have you noticed this? I mean, obviously that, what's your situation with your inheritance? And, and do you know people that have actually, I know there's farmers that are, are literally actively not having cancer treatments, because they would rather die, they've been diagnosed with cancer, they've got a potential of living on, but, but they're denying themselves the cancer treatments, because it would be better for their families if they died sooner, which is absolutely shocking, and our government should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for putting farmers in this situation. So, tell me about anything that you have

31:39encountered on your own personal stories, for instance. Yeah, so to, to step away, sorry, Jeff, go ahead. You go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, I was just saying to, to step away from the numbers for a minute, that's, that's one of them, the larger overarching parts of this is that it's a frankly evil policy, because what they have done by setting a date for this finance bill with the inheritance tax changes, is you have given a date to older or elderly or, or ill farmers, whose ownership structure, and, and that's bear in mind, the ownership structure that a lot of people operate under now is because that is the most sensible thing to do, that has been the most tax efficient and the most sensible thing to do for a very long time, because inheritance tax relief in the form of APR and BPR has been around to enable working farms to pass on. So, everyone's operated under that, and now you've given these farmers a date, which says, by this date,

32:41you need to, to pass away, otherwise your farm's going to be broken up in order to, to be passed over, and that's just evil. Yeah, and if I could give some statistics to that, because I'm a little story as well, first hand account from somebody that we, that Ben and I were talking to, but suicides, farming suicides, which were reported as suicides, obviously they're very private people, and so not every, every suicide will be probably published like that, but in 2022, there were 44 farm suicides. In 23, there were 62 suicides, which is up 50%, in 2024, almost 100 suicides, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you don't see something like 100 suicides between now and April, because their farmers are so up against this idea that they will feel like failures,

33:43if they have to sell, you know, 20% of their farm or 30% of their farm, which was handed down to them, it's a generational thing to pay inheritance tax, and they won't want to burden their kids with that, that guilt that they have to, but pretty much, make a farm that was a viable business into something that's no longer viable because of its size, and just to add that, you know, exactly one of those stories that we heard firsthand was a woman that basically was working for the ambulance service, and she was only very recently called out to a tender farmer who had hung himself, and he'd done that. He had been diagnosed with cancer, but he'd got 18 months to live, and so he wasn't going to die quick enough, so he took his own life, and it's pretty tragic, yeah. It's tragic, it's absolutely, absolutely tragic, and it shouldn't, shouldn't be happening

34:44it, it's putting, putting farmers in an impossible situation. Well, this government, they've got blood on their hands, that's for sure. Absolutely, and in way back at the start of the way back at the start of the Labour government, one of the first things they did, almost as a precursor, is they called the Farming Resilience Fund, which was a pot of money that the government used to contribute to several farming charities, the farm community network, which is a farm charity that you can reach out to if you're in, you know, for example, financial difficulty, or for any other issue, and they pulled the money away from that, and of course with what's happening, the FCN's caseload is at an all-time high, and now they have reduced funding with which to deal with it. I mean, obviously you're dairy farmers, aren't you? Or you cattle, cattle? Or do you

35:45do both? I'm an ex-dairy farmer, beef and arable now. Oh right, okay. I'm just being... I'm just not as it going with things like, you know, that we've been sort of, we've had avian flu, blue tongue, you know, foot and mouth. I mean, what's going on now? What are they throwing at you, anything at the moment? Yeah, there's always something on the horizon or current, so TB is ongoing, and that's a particular bone of contention of mine, because I think it's a very flawed test for a start. However, I don't want to get bogged down with that. Yeah, there's avian flu about, there's always, there's always something, and yeah, it's just more pressure for farmers, really, very often, very unnecessary, and we saw this with a foot and mouth, how government overreach can be startling leaf terrifying, to be honest, because introducing a contiguous

36:49hull, which was any farm that was touching a farm that had an animal that's basically showed positive on a PCR test, which we now know are not very good at best, and then to kill every animal in the surrounding area, that amounting to thousands and thousands needlessly, to show how dangerous they can be, actually, we have to be on our guard as farmers. Yeah, and we have, of course, Ferguson to blame for that one with his computing, and he did some with COVID, so the whole thing was manufactured, it was manufactured, so it's appalling, really, because I don't know if you still, when I first met you down in Devon, there was that wonderful vet, Roger Meekock, and he did a really great talk about PCR testing, and how

37:52ridiculous it is, because obviously we know that, you know, it doesn't work, it was never meant to be a diagnostic for viruses, though, yeah, it seems that it's still going on, and that you're still getting punished, so are you obviously you farmers, you're now getting back together after all the problems you've had, what do you have a way forward, or am I not allowed to know what's going on there, are you just keeping it, you're doing your own, your own little. I'll say yes, but I'm not going to tell you. No, I'm absolutely delighted about that, as long as you're still, you haven't lost your resolve, because I tell you what, I love the Devon and Cornwall farmers, because you're so together, and I mean, I was brought up in a farming community in Kent, and as far as the UK goes, it's Devon and Cornwall that are really leading the push for this,

38:59I'm hoping that you've managed to bring in other farmers from other chemtists, but how is that, if you've brought managed, bring other farmers. Yeah, I mean, I would be doing other parts of the country, disservice, there are some real good guys who've got very good organised local groups in different pockets of the country. Kent, in particular, actually, is a very strong following in Ken and Southeast there, because they partly in that area, they almost, they have a different issue in that the rural community there is a quite small, but also with such a proximity to London and large towns, they're going to feel even more isolated from the urban surroundings, so they'll be almost a stronger community there. I think with Devon and Cornwall and Somerset also, really, it's probably because there's just a higher prevalence of smaller family farms in those three counties, there's a lot more traditionally sized holdings, you're old yards, you're old buildings,

40:06family setups, the landscape doesn't lend itself to large, sprawling, expansive farms basically, so the IHT changes, which although I cover it at the start with average farm sizes, it is something that's going to affect family owned holdings more, and so because more of them are in the Southwest, it's something that affects more people by proxy, I guess. Also, the Southwest, as you was a little bit mental, so. And Jeff, have you got anything else that you want to mention? Because I'd like to go into the bigger picture about what's really going on in the world and you know quite a bit about that. Well, yeah, I'd only say that there is a bigger picture, and it's not just the UK farmers that are being affected, we've seen this throughout Europe, and this seems to be an agenda that's pretty clearly been set to take down the West, I believe,

41:07or certainly to take out all the independent businesses, but what a great way of doing it by controlling the food, because once you control the food, you control the people, so they're clearly coming for the Achilles heel, or at least if they can take us out, they can certainly get everyone else in line. And this isn't something new, I mean, basically it's something that's repeated itself through history, so we know that, for instance, I think it was, well, it was an attack on the farmers, there was a Bolshevik revolution, which was in Russia, in 1917 to 22, and that led to famine that killed millions, the Chinese famine, whether there was Holodomor also in Russia, so they had two goes, that's it, and then the Chinese famine, 58-61, millions of people starved to death in that, and then Holodomor and Cambodia between 75 and 79. Of course, the common elements with all of those is it was actually

42:14communist led, socialist led, and collectivism of farms, taking farmers off the lands, controlling how they farmed, and this led to devastating results. And we shouldn't be complacent in thinking that it can't happen again. We're in Ireland, we're isolated, and if we're not careful about how we manage things, this could happen again. And I won't go on about the Fabian Society too much, which they do deserve a mention, because all the Fabian Society, obviously, a lot of people have woken up to, but incidentally their emblem was a wolf in sheep's clothing, they had to take that down, and now it's just a tortoise, but when we strike we strike hard, because the tortoises slow, you see, their whole thing is gradual. So yeah, their little statement, I think, is for the work that is best administered, the more silent it is.

43:18Right. So in its own way, let's do this in a very stealthy manner. And we know that's also a socialist playbook, you know, sort of a slow boiling of the frog. So we're having more and more red tape, we're having more and more, you know, they're taking the subsidies away, everything by increments and now AHT, and you know, we're almost there. There'll be a prediction is that there'll be 40% less farms in five years time. Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, knowing what you know, knowing what we know, and do you think, I mean, is there any hope at all of turning us around? I mean, how do we, I mean, is it about raising public awareness? Is it about political pressure on the government? Is it about that we know what you're doing and, you know, and the people don't want this? Do we need to do more localized stuff? You know, do we need to sort of, you know,

44:25get communities together to create food production themselves, smaller farms, all this kind of thing to try and resist what the hell they want, because what they want is for you to go. So what can we do? And how can we help you? Yeah, fundamentally, and that's what's so interesting at the moment is there are so many aspects just sticking with the UK for a second, but there are so many aspects of society that have pretty major grievances with the current government. I mean, obviously it's not been enacted purely in the last 12 months. It's been built up, but there are so many people, groups as of right now that all have issues. And the difficult part is overcoming the last 30, 40 years of hyper individualization that has pushed everyone apart, basically. So it's very difficult to build bridges with groups that you don't necessarily have common ground with, you know,

45:28especially with sticking with agriculture, just right. We've been, I don't want to say, pushed out. That's the wrong word, but we've been pushed into this situation where you are on your farm all the time, just working, just trying to keep it all moving. You just don't have time to go to other things and meet other people, meet non-farming people and have conversations and create community links. And so the tricky part now is overcoming, is overcoming that and building bridges with, you know, groups who, I can't think of a brilliant example, but, you know, there's understandably and there should be a massive pushback against digital ID. So, you know, a group that wants to push against that, you know, trying to forge links with that, it would be the way forward. In terms of your local communities, combating a large, sorry, a wider,

46:34more globalist agenda, yes, the answer is local, because at the end of the day, the bit you can control is your immediate local environment, who you interact with, how you help there, and how they help you, how you feed yourself on a day-to-day basis, and how's yourself on a day-to-day basis, and looking after your neighbours. Your immediate community is how we will end up combating this, because at the moment, there is no one group or collection of groups that does possess the immediate pushback power. So, to get there, we need to have a good understanding of our local communities and our inter-community networks. Absolutely, yes. And, I mean, are you looking also at pressing the government to change the legislation that they have? I mean, is there any, any part of your action as taking any action towards legally looking at trust or whatever?

47:38I don't know what any way you can get over the legislation that's been thrown at. Yeah, so without going into specifics, without going into specifics of my situation on an open channel, yeah, I've looked into the trust thing, because put everything in a trust is something that often comes up in the online discourse surrounding this. Basically, it's not a solution for us. It may be a solution for some. Fundamentally, there's a large tax bill to pay when you create a trust and put assets into it. There's then every 10 years, there's a percentage tax bill due on it. If you close the trust, there's then another tax bill due on it, for the size of holding that we are here and the income that we currently generate, it's not an option, basically. So, without

48:43knowing everyone's situation, I would suggest it's not an option for a lot of people to be frank. Yeah, beyond that, the seven-year transition rule, which is often bounded around, that at the moment currently is still an option whereby the asset holder, landowner, gifts the land over, after seven years, there's no tax due on that transfer. The relief is tapered over that time period, with the first two years being 100% due, I believe, and it steps down to 70, then 30, then zero, but I'm not 100% sure on the time steps. But, obviously, at this point, with only four months to go, it's kind of a moot point, being a seven-year transition. Absolutely. So, would it be a good idea to collaborate with other kind of

49:50affected groups like fishermen and rural communities, small businesses to do with farming and landowners? Do you reach out to them to sort of try and get some cohesion with what's happening? Yes, it's quite a challenge. We have tried. It's hard to draw everyone together. But I would say that it's desperate times right now, and we do need to make the general public aware that we need to be not looking at climate emergency. We need to actually be looking at a food emergency, and I think we talked about this before, Sandy, maybe even a couple of years ago, where we need to declare a food emergency, because the actual statistics are that we are importing 53% of our food. The government won't tell you that, and as for fish, it's 92%. So, we're only actually 8% self-sufficient, and we're surrounded by sea, and it's absolutely crazy. Excuse me.

50:56Oh, isn't it? Yeah, and I mean, if we can't rally the country behind being self-sufficient in food, I don't know. There's no going to be no hope for us, really, because everyone has to eat every day. Well, absolutely. This is partly why I've asked you on, because I really think that we could actually start a big campaign against the fact that food security, well, is in danger, our government aren't acknowledging this, and actually food security, I think is one of the 13, what do they call protected food infrastructure of government? The government is supposed to protect food security, and there's 13 of those infrastructures, and they're not doing it. And I've raised this, I raised it in Parliament two years ago, where we have a debate in Parliament over food security, and I went there and put my views forward. Nothing ever happened,

51:59you know, and I know that Rachel, or just a council, or just dealt with food security issues within her council to say, we don't need to worry about net zero, net zero is not a problem, food is, and we've done this, and I've done it with my council, but there's just no reaction at all, because it seems to be a systemic sort of cognitive dissonance around it. So I think really, we've got to make a lot of noise about this, and this is partly why I thought it was important that you came on, because everyone, you see, because a lot of the time at these rallies, you don't get the real farmers speaking, and we need to hear from you, you are the real people. And so, yeah, that's something, if there is a takeaway message for the general public, like a very brief one, that's something that people should understand, is that if this inheritance tax comes in and stays in, food price will go up significantly, because if it doesn't,

53:06you're going to lose all your farms, because the small guys are just not going to be able to pay for it. They don't have the income available to them to cover the tax bill, and they don't have the income available to service alone, should they borrow to pay that tax bill either. So it's a non-starter. It's an incredibly short-sighted decision, but just to call back to your wider agenda very briefly, you know, Jeff and I know of at least one guy, I mean, I have friends, you know, my age and a bit younger, it's not just our issue. You know, these guys, they think, okay, well, I'll go and look at moving to another country. They go to New Zealand, I've got a friend New Zealand at the moment, they go to Australia, they go to Canada, it's the same problem, the same problems of present people, all of those anglers to their countries, at around about the same stage of the process, and it's food prices climbing, food price at the farm gate is down,

54:11there's these mysterious housing crises everywhere, yet house prices are through the roof, it's the same bracket of problems, all over the Angusphere, all at the same time. Absolutely, it's a destruction of the West and West and West. Oh, absolutely. So, and, you know, I've seen this in Canada in New Zealand, I mean, New Zealand with managed retreat is absolutely outrageous, I mean, there's farms on the coast and they're saying it's sea level rise, there is no sea level rise, you know, this is just a way of literally land grabbing and we're seeing a land grabbing all over the world and in England too, I mean, I've seen it on North Somerset coast with, you know, the salt marshes, they're saying, well, they're going to flood, they're deliberately flooding them, you know, because they want, you know, the land has to be destroyed. So, there's harbours in the southwest of England on the, you know, on the Devon and Cornwall coast,

55:12there's harbours that have been there for hundreds of years and the bottom step is still the bottom step. I mean, if that's not argument against sea level rise, I don't really know what it's. Really, the whole thing is a nonsense and it's just a way of destroying the food supply and destroying farms and really destroying us, you know, as people. And that is another conversation is going on, many places is that, you know, what happens to us as, you know, as nation states of Europe, we're being destroyed, yeah. Well, according to some of the elites, we're useless eaters anyway. Well, yeah, they can wealth that, they're pretty useless. And, yeah, they think they're God, they think they're, they think they're, you know, the supreme beings and that they should, yeah, we should be got rid of, but actually, you know, we're all, we're all, we're all here under,

56:13under one sky and we have to fight, fight for our livelihoods, really. I don't know, is there anything else we want to say because we're nearly done? Is there anything else you'd like to say to round up, really? Jeff or maybe Jeff Ben Ben and then Jeff, yes? Yeah, just just super briefly, I did touch it once before, when we talked before Sandy, something that I'm always quite interested in, they are yet again trying to change the firearms laws in this country, which I think is something that any nation should, should be aware of, they're basically trying to make it much more difficult for existing shotgun holders to carry on as they are. It will do nothing to prevent the small amount of gun crime that we have in this country. And if you look at the history of firearms legislation in this country, it's never provably done that. There are massaged statistics to say that it does, but it hasn't. And there,

57:21they are trying once again to effectively target the rural side of the country, which, fundamentally, are people that can eat and protect themselves. And it's just another avenue of attack on that. Absolutely. And it's been forever thus, since Dumb Lane, or even before, I think. Yeah, they've been trying to disarm farmers. And as you say, the statistics don't stack up. Farmers aren't crazy people, go around shooting people. They, for their work. And so they should. And yeah, I did, I did a thing actually, you, you, you've just reminded me when we spoke in Devon once, you told me all about this. And I did do a thing, a little, a little piece on the column about it, or probably, probably about a year ago. And yeah, it's, it, it is a problem. It is a problem. And I think that farmers should be honored with at least being able to protect their land and their, and their animals and everything else, because statistically, they are not

58:25crazy people, the shoot people. Yeah. And statistically, gun crimes are usually caused by people that don't, they don't want registered guns. So they'll find them from somewhere. So they're not, they're not taking them off the farmer and using them. A registered gun owner keeps it in his cabinet and is very, and is very careful about how he handles this, and he's guns or rifles, shotguns or rifles. So yeah, that would never change. And we've seen it in other countries. And I think America's the last one standing, isn't it? In in any big way that still can sort of, yeah, can defend themselves. Yeah, absolutely. I'm also the pitch, they pitch certain factions like the hunters, they pitch against other farmers. Didn't they? They try to divide them. Yeah, exactly that. I mean, if you were ever curious as to how, how a state gets what it gets what it wants by kind of subverting a certain segment of the population, that's exactly

59:31what happened in the firearms community. They structured the different bans and law changes to only affect certain parts of the community. So yeah, you're quite right. The example I once gave you is when they when they came to ban handguns, the guys who shot target rifles said, well, you know, I'm not going to stand up and push back because I'm not affected as a target shooter, and I don't want to cause trouble because then I might lose my bit. And then a couple of years later, when they came for the self loading rifles, the guys who shot shotguns said, well, I'm not going to stand up because it doesn't affect me and I don't want to cause trouble and draw attention to me. And now, 20 years later, which are those sounds like a long term, a long time in the scheme of legislative changes in a country, it's not, you know, now we've got the thing where shotguns are now under question. And there are no other segments left who are willing to start up and say, no, although this doesn't affect me, it's wrong to change it because the, you know, the target, the

1:00:34self loading rifle target community has gone, the handgun community has gone, you know, at the moment, they're trying to, they're trying to enact a ban on lead projectiles under some kind of incredibly wafer-thin green agenda based on a single study on nesting birds on the South Coast. It's a ludicrous proposition and quite how it managed to sneak its way into law. I do not know. Well, thank you for that. Any last words, Jeff? I don't think so. I'd like to just say thank you to you, Sandy, keep up the good work. I think I've learned a lot as a result of listening to your deep dives on different things and it's made me do my own research. We need a voice like yours and any ideas you've got for us to sort of bring us together, please do share it with us. We are, we're getting to the point where we're certainly going to be very soon desperate and desperate may, desperate men will take

1:01:37desperate measures. Well, you know, I'm absolutely well thank you for those words and I tell you what, I am 100% behind you and I will do anything in my power to to to really push this because this is this is this is food. This is what keeps us alive and and and this is how they this is how they operate. So I'm absolutely committed and and this isn't the end. We will continue. We'll just continue to this fight and we will have meetings in clandestine pubs in Devon and Cornwall and we will sorted all out. Well, thank you so much. It's been an absolute joy to speak to you although a very very very you know dark subject to be honest, but I'm absolutely convinced that we can fight this more and we can put pressure on the government and yeah, I just can't thank you enough for talking about all of this today. Thank you so much Ben and Jeff. Been wonderful to you. Thank you, Sandy. It's much appreciated.