23rd August 2026

British farming has an inheritance plan. What it needs is an entrance plan

We rightly worry about whether family farms can be passed to the next generation. But what chance does someone have of becoming the first farmer in their family?

British farming is having a difficult time.  Extreme weather is threatening crops and livelihoods. Costs remain punishing.

The inheritance tax debate brought farmers on to the streets of London. And Jeremy Clarkson, through the success of Clarkson’s Farm, has probably done more than anyone in recent years to make the wider public understand just how difficult and unpredictable farming can be. 

I welcome that. I have always thought farming needed its equivalent of Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay helped make people interested in what happens behind the kitchen door. Clarkson has done something similar for what happens beyond the farm gate.

But amid this groundswell of sympathy for British farmers, I want to ask a more uncomfortable question.

Why is British farming still so overwhelmingly white – and why is it still so difficult for anybody from a non-traditional farming background to get in?

Nowadays, simply putting the word “diversity” into a conversation seems enough to invite a backlash from the anti-woke mob. But here goes.

According to Defra’s 2025 agricultural workforce survey, 99.7% of principal farmers and holders in England who answered its ethnicity question identified as white.

Just think about that figure: 99.7%.

In almost any other major British industry, we would look at a figure like that and ask serious questions.

So why don’t we ask them about farming?

I launched The Black Farmer 25 years ago after buying my small farm on the Devon-Cornwall border. I should make something clear: I don’t pretend to be the bloke who gets up at five every morning and jumps on a tractor. Much of the actual farming on my land has been done by my neighbour.

But the name The Black Farmer was deliberately provocative.

People would say to me: “A black farmer? I’ve never seen one of those.”

Exactly.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps we should be asking why that reaction remains understandable.

Although ethnicity is an obvious part of this debate, I think the problem goes much wider.

British farming doesn’t simply have a diversity problem. It has an entry problem.

If you are black, Asian or from another minority background, the barriers are obvious. But if you are a white working-class kid from Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle whose parents have never owned an acre of land, your chances of becoming a farmer aren’t particularly encouraging either.

Where is your way in?

That is what I mean by people from non-traditional farming backgrounds: anybody who hasn’t inherited the network, knowledge, land or capital that comes from growing up within farming.

You might have the passion. You might have the ideas. You might even have the ability to become a brilliant farmer.

But where do you begin?

The inheritance tax debate has focused attention on whether farming families should be able to pass their farms from one generation to another. I understand why that matters.

But there is another question that receives remarkably little attention.

What about the person trying to become the first farmer in their family?

We spend enormous political energy discussing how to protect inheritance. Perhaps we should devote some of that energy to creating entrance.

There is nothing wrong with celebrating families who have successfully farmed the same land for generations. That continuity and accumulated knowledge are valuable.

But heritage cannot become the entrance qualification to one of Britain’s most important industries.

People may reasonably ask whether there are actually black people, or people from other non-traditional backgrounds, who want to become farmers.

I can tell you from personal experience that they exist.

Because of the profile of The Black Farmer brand, I am constantly approached by people asking me how they can get into farming or how they can get hold of land to farm. The frustrating thing is that, more often than not, I cannot help them. There simply isn’t an obvious route I can point them towards.

And that is the problem.

How can somebody aspire to enter an industry when they cannot see a realistic way in?

Why would a young black person growing up in Birmingham, Brixton or Bradford consider farming when they rarely see anybody who looks like them doing it, don’t have land to inherit and can see no affordable route into the industry?

And why would a young person from any urban or non-farming family seriously contemplate it when the first question is: where am I going to find the land?

Aspiration does not develop in a vacuum. People need to see a door before we complain that they aren’t trying to walk through it.

Britain already has organisations capable of helping to open that door.

The National Trust is the country’s largest farm owner, with more than 1,300 tenant farmers. Then there are organisations such as the Duchy of Cornwall, the Crown Estate, the Church Commissioners, universities and local authorities controlling or managing substantial amounts of land.

So I would like to ask these institutions a simple question:

What are you doing to create the first generation of farmers?

Why couldn’t some of that land be used for properly designed programmes allowing people from non-traditional farming backgrounds to prove themselves?

Create starter farms. Offer affordable tenancies. Provide mentoring and access to equipment. Pair experienced farmers approaching retirement with ambitious newcomers. Create apprenticeships that can lead not simply to employment on somebody else’s farm but eventually to a tenancy of your own.

Give people a ladder.

Because at the moment we spend a lot of time asking how farming families can pass the farm down. We spend remarkably little asking how somebody outside that world can climb up.

Then bring the supermarkets into the equation.

Access to land without access to a market only solves half the problem.

Our major supermarkets wield enormous influence over British food. They should be part of creating routes to market for a new generation of farmers and food producers, giving promising new entrants an opportunity to get their produce on to supermarket shelves.

Jeremy Clarkson has helped Britain fall in love with farming again. But Clarkson himself illustrates the problem rather neatly: buying your way into farming is an option if you already have considerable financial resources.

For most outsiders, it isn’t.

So perhaps the next chapter in the farming story should be about opening the gate.

Twenty-five years later, I still think farming needs outsiders. 

It needs people who ask stupid questions because nobody has told them those questions are stupid.

It needs people bringing different cultures, foods, technologies and business models.

It needs people who look at a field and see something different from what previous generations saw.

This isn’t about replacing traditional farmers. It is about adding to them.

Climate change is forcing farmers to reconsider crops, water, soil and established methods. Technology and AI are changing what is possible. Consumer tastes are changing. Food security is once again becoming a serious national conversation.

Surely an industry facing that degree of change should be doing everything possible to attract people with different experiences and different ideas.

I grew up in Birmingham helping my father on his allotment. Nobody looking at that boy would have imagined that one day he would buy a farm and create a mainstream British food brand called The Black Farmer.

That is precisely why I believe so strongly in outsiders.

We should continue celebrating the family that has farmed the same land for 200 years.

But I want us to become just as excited about the black kid from Birmingham, the council-estate kid from Manchester, or anybody else without a farming surname becoming the first farmer their family has ever produced.

British farming faces serious challenges from climate change, costs, taxation and food security.

But perhaps its greatest long-term challenge is the one we hardly talk about:

Who gets the opportunity to become a farmer in the first place?

We have spent a great deal of time protecting the inheritance of British farming.

Now it is time to open the gate.