Warning over threat to tenant farming incomes

Farm business incomes may have increased across the majority of farm types last year, but support payments typically account for huge chunks of those figures, a meeting held by George F White heard.

Robyn Peat, the firm’s managing partner, explained that average farm income over the last five years was around £40,000 with support payments contributing, on average, £25,000 of that sum.

For lowland and less favoured areas of grazing farmland, the average income of £19,000 over the same period included £15,500 of subsidy.

In Yorkshire, the average farm business income over the same period equated to £103 per acre, of which £73 was received in subsidies.

With average arable farm rental prices over the last 12 months coming in at £78 per acre under old-style Agricultural Holdings Act tenancies, and £141 under Farm Business Tenancy agreements, Mr Peat predicts a shake-up in the industry when future changes to farming support kick in.

“What that means in my view is there is going to be less farmers and how that will affect the supply and demand in the rental market will be very interesting to see,” Mr Peat said.

Taking part in the discussion was George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, who told The Yorkshire Post that he was still waiting for a response from the Government to a report that the TFA helped prepare last autumn to outline how the tenanted sector could benefit from future policy reforms.

Mr Dunn said: “We’re lobbying for longer tenancies and tenancies which are more able to cope with the challenging circumstances that we are expecting the sector to face in the future.”

According to the TFA, 80 per cent of Farm Business Tenancies are let for less than five years and just six per cent are for terms of 10 years or more.