Farmers should spend more time feeling grateful and less time moaning.

And that’s a farmer talking.

On Pancake Day farmers staged a fourth tractor protest in central London, calling on the Government to back down on its plan to bring in inheritance tax on farms worth £1 million and over.

The hue and cry from the agri brigade has, perhaps surprisingly, gathered widespread public support. A petition to scrap it has had 150,000 signatures..

Yet South Devon’s veg box pioneer Guy Singh Watson says he supports the principle that the wealthy – even farmers, who’ve so far been exempt from IHT – should pay their fair share of tax. The new rate from April is 20 per cent – half the general rate. Guy also thinks the Government has missed a trick by not looking at a tax loophole farmers benefit from – that of roll-over relief.

…sometimes more than we deserve.

He told an audience of rapt members of the South Hams Society that if farmers sell land for development and immediately buy more land, they pay no tax on the capital gain they make. Considering that if fields are worth £1 million an acre with permission for housing, rather than £10,000 for spuds, that’s a lot of capital gain. “I think you could raise at least £10 Billion if you removed that loophole,” he said. “Why shouldn’t you , with that good fortune, why shouldn’t your local community benefit from that. Most of that uplift in value should be captured for the public purse.”

It makes the £400 million projected gain from the new IHT look paltry, he said, without the political cost. While he supports farmers paying IHT in principle, he does feel the £1 million threshold is too low. Even a farm worth £3 million he says is “barely viable” if it’s in livestock. “Anyone with £10 million should pay the same as everyone else. Lots of people have got it tough and lots of people would like to pass (their business) down the generations and don’t have the privileges farmers have – why should we be treated so differently.”

Where he is in sympathy with farmers protesting is the fact that while a farmhouse may be a “des res” , the farmers inside it earn very little. A longtime loather of supermarkets, Guy said that 35-40 years ago he earned about 40p in the pound for his veg from contracts with two major chains. Today, that would be down to 25p. Which is one reason he kissed goodbye to supermarkets and started the veg box business, which now – statistics alert – packs a veg box every TWO SECONDS of the working day and makes 65,000 deliveries a week.

He said supermarkets watched the media coverage and waited for a month before it was clear which way the wind was blowing, before joining in the chorus of support for farmers – support which is
“sometimes more than we deserve.”

“Their actual rank hypocrisy is just jaw dropping, whereas if they paid a fair price for food, farmers would have no problem paying IHT like everyone else!”