Preparing for big farming changes
The revised Agriculture Bill is passing rapidly through its Parliamentary process.
It sets out how farm subsidy will vary in future years with direct payments to farmers currently made through the Basic Payment Scheme being completely delinked from farming and phased out after 2027.
While the present Government has committed that there will be no reduction in the overall level of payments to the sector in this Parliament (up to December 2024 at the latest), how the cash is distributed to individual businesses will see the biggest change for more than 30 years.
The proposals are that after this year’s payments, the amount received in future years will reduce. For most businesses, the level of subsidy received in 2024 will be approximately half of what is received in 2020.
All farmers need to be considering how this reduction in cash will impact their businesses and the thinking, planning and taking action needs to start now.
The changes proposed to the support for farming are unprecedented in many of our working lifetimes and the coming few years will be a critical time.
Berrys is offering to undertake a free initial assessment of the past three years’ accounts of farming businesses between now and the end of 2020.
Mark Lord, business consultant at Berrys
