Several months before farmers hit the headlines, after protesting in Whitehall against the new government’s inheritance tax rules, we at Sky News embarked on a project.
Most of our stories are relatively short stories, recorded and edited for the evening news. We capture snapshots of life in households, businesses and communities across the country. But this year, we decided to do something different: spend a year telling the story of a family farm.
We had no idea at the time that agriculture would become a front page article. But even in January, 2024 was shaping up to be a critical year for the sector. After all, this was the year when the new post-Brexit the agricultural payments scheme would come into full force. From relying on subsidies each year to simply cultivate a given area of land, farmers were now asked to engage in different programs focused less on food and more on environmental goals.
It was also the first full year of new trade agreements with New Zealand and Australia. The result of these deals is that British farmers now compete with two of the world’s largest food exporters, who can export more to Britain than they currently do.
You can watch Sky News’ special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News on Friday at 9pm.
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Furthermore, the winter that has just passed has been a particularly difficultespecially for field crop farmers. Cold, wet and unpredictable – even more so than the usual British weather. This promised to be a difficult year for growth.
With all of this in mind, we decided to document what a year like this actually looks like for a farm – in this case, Lower Drayton Farm in Staffordshire. In some ways this mixed farm is quite typical of parts of the UK: they raise livestock and grow wheat, and also subcontract some of their fields to potato and carrot growers.
A look at agriculture reinvented
But in other ways, the two generations of the Bower family here, Ray and Richard, are doing something unusual. Noting the sharp drop in income from growing food in recent years, they are trying to reimagine what agriculture could look like in the 21st century. And in their case, this means building a play center for children and alongside them activities that could be described as “agritourism”.
The Bower family
The result is that although much of their daily work remains traditional farming, an increasing share of their income comes from non-food activities. This underscores a larger point: Farmers across the country are being asked to do unusual things to make ends meet. Some, like the Bowers, accept this change; others have difficulty adapting. But with wetter years expected and further changes in government support, the years ahead could be a roller coaster ride for British farming.
With that in mind, I encourage you to view our film this year through the lens of this farm. This is, we hope, a fascinating and nuanced insight into life on earth.
You can watch Sky News’ special report, The Last Straw, on Sky News on Friday at 9pm.