Meet the family fighting to save their farm from financial ruin

Jerry Flake points out a tractor’s giant rear wheel as he hoists a hay bale the size of a Ford Focus into position – it’s a perhaps surprising example of the knife-edge on which many of the country’s 185,000 family-run farms now find themselves.

An already perilous situation that has worsened since Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ tax-raising autumn Budget….

“Of course, those large tyres look robust but we’re farming with flint in the soil here, so we’re lucky if a tyre like that lasts a single season,” says Jerry, 67.

At a hefty £1,500 a pop, the frequent tyre replacements add to his family’s mounting bills. And there are six tractors on their 1,000-acre arable, sheep and beef business within the South Downs National Park.

But the attractive rolling landscape can be expensively deceptive.

For here, “England’s green and pleasant land” is of rather poorer quality.

Jerry adds: “The soil here is less than 6in deep and beneath that is unforgiving chalk.” So that porous bedrock makes ploughing a delicate process.

His wife Jenny then sums up the situation for the holding, which has been in the same family since 1901: “Quite simply, the farm is not profitable.”

Her childless brother Trevor Passmore died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 67, leaving the farm in two shares to Jenny and to his nephew Andrew.

Jenny, now 70, continues: “Andrew was aged 22, so it was a very big decision for him to make.

“But he had always wanted to farm and lambed his first lamb when he was three. Someone said, ‘Should that child be there?’ I looked around, and there was Andrew lambing a ewe.”

For Andrew, the farm was a surprise inheritance which also came with the debts of previous generations, that were still being carefully managed.

He calls it “a poisoned chalice. It’s home and we are the custodians of it, but as the farmer you are at the bottom of the list.

“Above you are all the family you support, then the workers and the businesses that rely on you. The animals are sold at market and we support local butchers, tractor dealers, mechanics, vets, engineers, corn merchants and grain dealers, and numerous self-employed people and small enterprises.”

The wider family now farms it together but, although Andrew works for up to 120 hours a week, “breaking even” on the land and livestock is all that the current three generations can hope for.

Jenny adds: “It’s a way of life and sustains an entire family but years ago we had to diversify to survive.”

She is the matriarchal mastermind behind Coombes Farm which is overlooked at its easterly edge by the 90ft-high flying buttresses of Lancing College chapel which can be seen from miles around.

Jenny explains her view on the farm: “We don’t look at the land as having a cash value – its value is immaterial. What we want to do is be able to pass it on.”

In 1979, Jenny knew the farm had to diversify to enable it to survive, amid greater running costs than ever.

Open farm days in previous years had seen up to 10,000 visitors. She continues: “I’m fourth generation and we used to employ 22 full-time workers in my grandfather’s day.

“Now we struggle to pay one person full-time. We have two part-time workers including a 16-year-old apprentice.”

Hence it is the farm’s tours, open lambing, annual maize maze, camping, venue hire and agricultural contracting that together create the family’s income.The most recent year of open lambing resulted in 20,000 visitors flocking down the muddy lane to the farm. That growth has continued with the support of volunteers.

Jenny says proudly: “We are a working farm that opens, not a play farm. We talk about everything honestly and we show farming as it really is.

“Recently, I had two non-verbal children visiting who spoke for the first time while they were here.” One was a disabled youngster, the other was a refugee.

“This little boy had come from a village where everything had been destroyed and his family had been killed.

“He had been put in London away from all that was familiar and was not speaking a word. But he started talking to our lambs in his own language.

“A farm is much bigger than the land that it is standing on,” she adds. Andrew concurs: “My grandad used to say that we are custodians of the land for the next generation.”

The family are united in wanting their own next generation to have the option to continue – that is Connie, five; James, three; Humphrey, one, and six-year-old cousin Jack, the son of Andrew’s sister Pamela, 32.

But even the redoubtable Jenny is having sleepless nights over the Government’s recent financial thunderbolt of making some farms liable for inheritance tax for the first time. It is a highly controversial measure, and the Daily Express is running a crusade called Save Britain’s Family Farms to try and have it dropped.

Andrew says: “Mum has worked her whole life for something that will be lost when she passes on. It is a hard picture to talk about.”

Jenny explains: “When I die, Andrew will have to sell a portion of the farm to pay the inheritance tax due on my share. It will only just be viable for him to continue with the farm after selling to pay that.

“But when Andrew dies, under the new rules it simply will not be viable for the next generation – and the farm will have to be sold.” The farm’s location in the expensive South-East of England – where land values are high – means that once the death duties are paid there will not be enough of the farm left over to farm.

Jenny continues: “Once a farm is gone, it’s gone forever. People keep saying that I should leave my share in trust to Andrew now, but you have to survive seven years to pass on assets placed in trust, and then where would I live?”

For she would then be legally required to pay market rent on her farm cottage opposite the pretty Tudor farmhouse where Andrew lives with his wife Gussie Harmer, 27, and their children.

Andrew would then have to pay tax on the income – but Jenny and Jerry do not have the money. Like the majority of family farmers, they are asset rich and cash poor.

Jenny says: “When Trevor died of cancer, we did everything correctly to ensure the future of the farm, but we can’t pivot this fast and what happens if there are further changes?” She believes that the Government is failing to consider the impact of its Budget changes on other family members:

“When someone dies and a house is sold, it can be left in equal portions to the children. But when you are passing down a farm things must be made fair for other members of the family, like my daughter Pamela.

“You can’t sell the farm to do this because it is also a food-production business, so it is already a complicated situation which the Government has failed to appreciate.” Andrew says he has never seen his inspirational mum so concerned about the sudden change in her family’s outlook.

It comes at a point in her life when she might have reasonably expected to be looking with pride at a life of hard graft that made the farm all it is, including being a resource where people in the region can learn about farming and the rural way of life.

Says Jenny: “It genuinely concerns me what is going to happen in the future.

“It’s so changeable. We are trying to plan to do the right thing. Andrew may have chosen a different life if he knew this was going to happen, but it’s now too late for him to make new plans.”

The family’s main herd is pedigree Sussex beef cattle, renowned for high-quality meat and a calm temperament.

But on a recent blustery afternoon Andrew was using a JCB agricultural fork-lift telehandler to spread barley straw bedding in a barn for the glossy, dark, cocoa-coloured Angus cross calves that were brought into the farm for the spring. They were soon busy exploring for tasty barley heads to crunch to supplement their diet.

Nearby, Charollais lambs – “popular with local butchers for being leaner and with more meat on the animal”, Jerry says – were being fattened up over the winter in the warm sweet-smelling barn.

Chickens and working dogs were busy in the yard on my visit, as a guilty spaniel sprinted by with a stolen pheasant gripped in its jaws.

Young Connie pointed out: “They hang on this line before we can eat them.”

Jerry says of his young grandchildren, who he scoops up for photographs: “Farm children have incredible common sense.”

The youngsters are sixth generation in their father Andrew’s family, and seventh-generation farmers on their mother’s side – Gussie also farms her nearby family holding.

Gussie adds defiantly: “The Government have targeted the wrong bracket. Farms are high turnover and low profit, and we are at the mercy of the weather and world events – most recently Brexit and then the war in Ukraine which has had a knock-on effect on fertiliser and fuel costs.

“The minimum wage has also been upped as well as national insurance, so this had already made it more difficult to employ workers. Now some important subsidies have been pulled overnight and we are left in limbo. We don’t know what to put in the ground…”

Several family members joined the recent tractor rally in London as farmers tried to impress upon the Government just how dire their situation is.

It took them three hours to get there at a top speed of 30mph.

Jerry recalls: “We were in a convoy of 30 Sussex tractors from our area, and there were 650 tractors in all in central London. It was very important to be there.”

Andrew sums up the family view: “It should be everyone’s right to fresh, quality produce that has been produced locally to high standards – but the Government has pulled the grass from under our feet.”