The New Feudalism: Tax Dodgers, Diddly Squat, and Fuck Farming
Eric Suquet has been farming for ten years. Before that, he
had a successful freelance career in video production and, by his own account,
made very good money. After a decade of sustainable farming in New York state,
he recently sat down and wrote an essay that begins with the words “Fuck
farming,” and then spent several thousand words explaining, with great
precision and considerable pain, exactly why.
Now consider Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is also, in a
technical sense, a farmer, but in reality is just a new feudal landowner,
taking charge of his new surfs and demonstrating his moral righteousness by his
jovial banter and occasional care. He owns Diddly Squat, 1,000 acres of
Cotswolds farmland near Chipping Norton, purchased for £4.25 million. In 2021
he told The Times that avoiding inheritance tax was “the
critical thing” in his decision to buy it. He had already written on the Top
Gear website that “the government doesn’t get any of my money when I die” as
one of the “sensible reasons” for the purchase.
These are two different relationships with farming an ocean
apart, but with a theme of tax avoidance and surfdom joining them.
Every year, bright-eyed people sign up for sustainable
farming courses, attend workshops, buy books by Joel Salatin and Jean-Martin
Fortier, and come away convinced that if they just work hard enough and make
smart enough choices, small-scale ethical food production is a viable way to
make a living. Eric Suquet was one of them. He is not alone in his
disillusionment.
The courses hand out spreadsheets showing that the numbers
can work. What the spreadsheets don’t include, Eric notes, are the start-up
costs: land access, equipment, infrastructure, all of which are eye-watering,
especially in areas where tourism and holiday homes have already inflated
property values well beyond anything the agriculture of the land could justify.
The spreadsheets also tend to omit health insurance, childcare, retirement
savings, and sick days, treating these not as costs but as optional luxuries
that dedicated farmers can simply forgo. Going without these things is
considered part of the farm hustle, and some wear it proudly, but as Eric
points out: these are sacrifices no one should have to make.
Then there is the pricing problem, which is so structurally
peculiar that it deserves its own paragraph. Sustainable farming courses teach
something that no other business class anywhere in the world would dare say:
don’t set your prices based on the market. The reason they say this is that the
market price for food, driven by the economies of industrial agriculture, bears
no relationship whatsoever to the true cost of producing food ethically and
sustainably. To cover inputs and achieve even a slim margin, small sustainable
farmers need to charge three to five times what conventional farming puts on
the supermarket shelf. This means their entire business model depends on
finding customers who are educated, ideologically motivated, and have enough
disposable income to pay the premium. These customers exist. They are not
numerous enough. They show up at the farmer’s market when the weather is nice
and they’re having people over. This does not constitute a stable revenue base.
The result is what Eric describes with rueful accuracy: a
sector full of people farming on ideology and going broke on economics. The
smiling farmer at the market stall is often at least half marketing, because
the kale needs to sell. The farm that looks thriving on Instagram may have a
GoFundMe running in the background, as Eric discovered when a competitor he’d
long admired, a pig farmer who hustled brilliantly and built real customer
loyalty, posted a six-figure fundraising appeal because the farm was on the
verge of going under. Not because of any single disaster. Just the ongoing,
daily disaster of farming.
What Eric doesn’t quite get to in his essay, though he
circles it, is that this economic impossibility doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It
is partly the result of a specific policy choice: the decision to allow wealthy
non-farmers to buy agricultural land as a tax shelter, which has inflated the
cost of the one input that small farmers cannot improvise, innovate around, or
cut out of the spreadsheet entirely. You can rig up cheaper equipment. You
cannot rig up cheaper land.
In the UK, Agricultural Property Relief began with a
defensible idea. When a farming family inherits a farm, they shouldn’t be
forced to sell it to pay an inheritance tax bill. Farming passes between
generations; breaking that chain every time someone dies would destroy working
farms. Fine. Reasonable.
The problem is that “agricultural land” includes land owned
by anyone, for any reason, as long as it is technically agricultural. You don’t
have to farm it. You don’t have to understand farming. You don’t have to have
ever been in a field. You just need to hold agricultural land, at which point
your estate becomes substantially exempt from the 40% inheritance tax that
applies to everyone else. For a person with serious wealth to shelter, buying
farmland at almost any price makes rational fiscal sense, not because the land
produces a good agricultural return but because it parks the money somewhere
the taxman cannot reach.
The consequences were entirely foreseeable. Demand for
farmland from wealthy non-farming ‘investors’ drove prices far beyond what the
agriculture of the land could justify. Arable land in England averaged £11,200
per acre in 2023, up 22% in five years. In desirable areas it exceeds £20,000
per acre. This is not the price of food-producing capacity. It is the price of
a tax dodge. The richest 7% of agricultural property relief claimants, just 117
people, took 40% of the total relief. The top 37 took 22% of it, costing the
public £119 million. You can be quite confident that very few of those 37
people were up at five in the morning with a sick sheep.
See my post on UK land Wealth:
Green Deserts & Paper Profits: The True Cost of UK Land
Wealth
·
Jan 30
A Fifty-Year History of UK Land Values: From Productive
Asset to Financial Monopoly
James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner and
reliably outspoken critic of government overreach in business, owns
approximately 33,000 acres of farmland worth around £500 million. Under the old
regime, all of it passed to his heirs tax-free. He opposed the Labour reforms
vigorously. The surprise is difficult to locate.
When those reforms were announced, the farming lobby claimed
70,000 families would be affected. Tax expert Dan Neidle at Tax Policy
Associates went through the actual data and put the real number at under 500
farms per year. The Institute for Government called the lobby’s figures
sweeping and unreliable. The trick, elegantly executed, was to present Dyson’s
half-billion-pound estate and a 200-acre hill farm in Cumbria as having
identical interests, and to insist that any reform striking one must devastate
the other. They don’t. It doesn’t. But the noise was enough to generate
marches, parliamentary debates, and Jeremy Clarkson on Newsnight.
This is a similar land market in which Eric Suquet in the
USA is trying to access a working farm. The same inflated prices. The same
competition from buyers for whom agricultural return is irrelevant. Eric writes
about the land around his farm being carved up between wealthy weekenders and
retirees, with the local economy shifting to serve them: mowing their lawns,
building their mansions, serving farm-to-table tapas to people who enjoy the
view of the fields but don’t particularly want to pay the farmer who maintains
it. Multi-generational working farms dying slow painful deaths. “There’s a
story my neighbours tell themselves about the place they live being a farm
community,” he writes, “but their presence leaves very little room for working
farmers.”
He is describing, with the granular specificity of someone
who lives it, the end state of a system that has been treating agricultural
land as an investment vehicle for several decades.
Kaleb Cooper is in his mid-twenties, born in Chipping
Norton, and worked on Diddly Squat before Clarkson bought it. When the new
owner turned up and asked him to drive the tractor more slowly past the house
so the cat could run around safely, Kaleb resented him. He knows which fields
drain and which don’t, which slopes frost first, and which soil responds to
which rotation. When Clarkson bought a £40,000 Lamborghini tractor and proposed
using it in ways Kaleb considered idiotic, Kaleb told him he was a fucking
idiot. Probably correct. When Clarkson referred to him in a book as “a tractor
driver,” this shows that landownership is seen as a feudal lord and workers are
but uneducated serfs.
Gerald Cooper, no relation, has worked this specific land
for fifty years. He was there before Clarkson and is there now. A dry-stone
wall specialist with irreplaceable knowledge of the Cotswolds landscape, he had
prostate cancer during filming and continued to show up. The show presents him
as a loveable rural oracle. What he actually is, underneath the entertainment,
is a man who has spent his entire working life maintaining the physical
infrastructure of a farm he does not own and will never own.
Eric Suquet writes about something similar, though in
American terms: the culture of farmer martyrdom that nobody questions. The
unspoken expectation is that real farmers sacrifice health insurance,
retirement savings, and financial security as proof of their commitment. He
names it honestly: “these are sacrifices no one should have to make.” He also
names the shame that keeps farmers quiet about their failing health and falling
incomes, the reluctance to admit that the thing they love doing isn’t economically
viable, the way the smiling market stall and the Instagram harvest shots create
a false picture that other struggling farmers then feel they must maintain.
None of Kaleb’s genuine expertise, and none of Gerald’s
fifty years, and none of Eric’s decade of literal blood, sweat, and tears are
reflected in who owns the land they work. The people with the knowledge cannot
afford the land. The people who can afford it understand its value is a number
that should go up, and without tax.
Medieval feudalism: a small number of people owned all the
land, a large number of people worked it and paid rents or service, ownership
passed down through inheritance, and pointing this out was generally
inadvisable, lest you end up dangling from a rope. The poor relied on the
commons to sustain them, but then the Enclosures removed common rights and
stole the land, causing immeasurable suffering to the now landless poor. The
Corn Laws kept food prices high for the benefit of the landowner, not for those
farming the land. In 1880, 322 of the 652 MPs owned more than 2,000 acres.
We replaced feudalism, without changing the outcome for
those who worked the land. Instead of feudal law concentrating land in a few
hands, tax law does it. The countryside now hosts what you might call the
lifestyle landowner: wealthy, usually with income from finance, politically
connected; broadly in favour of less regulation and lower taxes, except for the
assets they now own having zero tax upon them. They hide behind a patriotic lie
and say their wealth is special and say if it is taxed its is a threat to the
rural way of life and the future of British agriculture.
Eric Suquet is more plainspoken about this class than the
policy papers tend to be. He describes wealthy weekenders referring to “their
farmers” like they were rescue puppies. He describes the local community
consuming the aesthetic of rural farming life while leaving very little room
for the working farmers who actually produce it. He writes about working for
this type of landowner personally and uses, without any editorialising, the
word “serfs.” He is not being rhetorical. He is describing his actual working
conditions.
When, in the UK, the Labour reforms came, the lifestyle
landowners did not say: fair enough, we bought this as a tax shelter, scale it
back. They appeared at protests and talked about heritage and family and the
British countryside. Some may have believed it. The tragedy is that there are
genuine farming families caught in the same policy, with real problems that
deserve real solutions. The trick, again, is presenting those families and
Dyson’s 33,000 acres as if they are the same situation. They are not. Conflating
them is how a relief designed to protect working farms became a subsidy for the
super-rich, and how reforming it became something the super-rich could credibly
oppose in the name of the very farmers they are pricing out.
Henry George published Progress and Poverty in
1879 and it became, briefly and unexpectedly, one of the most-read books in the
English-speaking world. By the early 1900s, it was reportedly more popular than
Shakespeare. His argument was simple. The value of land is not created by the
person who owns it. It is created by the surrounding community: by the roads,
schools, infrastructure, the new machinery and growing efficiency, all
contributing to general prosperity that makes land useful and desirable. A
landowner who does nothing but sit on their land will watch its value rise
anyway, as the community invests around them. George called this the “unearned
increment.” It belongs to the community that generated it, not the individual
holding the title. His proposed remedy was a land value tax set at the full
annual unimproved rental value of land, with all other taxes abolished.
In 1910 the Liberal government tried to implement a version
of it and failed catastrophically, mostly because the landowners owned every
aspect of political life and communications. The idea has spent the century
being suppressed in economic departments and political circles, not attacked,
not disproved - just ignored.
A land value tax, levied annually on the rental value of all
land regardless of how it’s used, would end the tax-shelter game immediately.
You cannot avoid it by leaving land fallow. You cannot avoid it by agricultural
classification. You cannot move a field to Luxembourg. The tax falls on whoever
holds the land, every year, and the only way to make it tolerable is to use the
land productively enough to cover the cost. A wealthy investor who bought 300
acres of Oxfordshire to shelter an estate would face an annual bill for the
privilege. The agricultural return, which was never really the point, would not
come close. He would sell. The buyer most likely to replace him, at prices that
finally reflected farming value rather than tax-shelter value, would be someone
who actually intends to farm, and although the land‘s unimproved value is
taxed, the new working farmers’ labour, the things they buy and sell and the
incomes of the people who buy food’s labour will be untaxed - now rewarding
their hard work.
Land cannot be created. Its supply is fixed. A tax on land
value has no deadweight loss: it doesn’t reduce the supply of land, doesn’t
discourage production, and can’t be passed on to tenants or consumers the way
taxes on labour and profit can. Smaller mixed farms with diverse cropping also
tend to be more productive per acre than large monocultures. The economies of
scale that favour giant holdings depend partly on land being cheap to hold.
Make it expensive to hold and the case for farming it well, rather than sitting
on it as an appreciating asset, strengthens considerably. More farmers, more
food, more efficiently. Not a complicated argument. Just one the people who own
most of the land would prefer to keep buried. And what about all the land now
not profitable to farm? It would return to nature and protect us all, providing
ecosystem services and reversing our loss of biodiversity.
Eric Suquet writes that sustainable farming “isn’t possible
without significant external inputs, namely money, which means it’s not
actually sustainable.” He is right, and he is also diagnosing the symptom
rather than the disease. The external inputs are required mostly because the
cost of land access has been inflated to the point of absurdity by people using
it as a tax vehicle. Fix the land market and you don’t fix everything: the
weather and the broken tractor are still coming. But you fix the foundation.
You make it possible for people who know what they’re doing to own what they’re
doing it on. You stop forcing capable farmers to be serfs on someone else’s
tax-planning strategy.
Kaleb Cooper cannot buy Diddly Squat. He couldn’t when
Clarkson bought it and he can’t now. The land is priced for what a wealthy
person will pay to shelter an estate, not for what a farmer can earn from it.
His competition in any land sale is not other farmers. It is people for whom
the agricultural return is incidental.
Under a land value tax, this changes. The annual holding
cost of 1,000 acres of Cotswolds farmland becomes real, recurring, and
unavoidable. Those who farm productively can justify it. Those using it as a TV
backdrop and a pheasant shoot cannot, at least not indefinitely. They sell.
Prices fall toward what farming the land is actually worth. Kaleb can put
together a business case. He can own the thing he already runs.
Eric Suquet is trying to find a way to stay in farming after
ten years of working past exhaustion for little to nothing, in a land market
inflated by people who refer to him and his like as “their farmers.” He writes
about this with honesty, with dark humour and a love for farming that persists
despite everything it has cost him. He deserves to be able to afford the land
he farms. Under the current system, he largely cannot. Under a land value tax,
the person pricing him out of that land would face an annual obligation for
holding it that made doing so for purely financial reasons increasingly
unattractive. The land would move toward people who need it to work.
Gerald Cooper has worked his land for fifty years. Under any
honest account of who deserves custodianship of agricultural land, the answer
is him, and Kaleb, and Eric. Under the current fiscal system, they are the
hired help.
Sources: Eric Suquet, “Fuck Farming,” Substack (April
2026); the Institute for Government; Tax Justice UK; Savills Research; Land Use
Policy (ScienceDirect, 2024); Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879);
the Mirrlees Review of the Institute for Fiscal Studies; Tax Policy Associates.
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