The Highwire with Del Bigtree - UK FAMILY FARMS UNDER THREAT

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

In 2022, the UK government offered to buy out small struggling farms and now more recently have imposed a 20% death tax on already struggling family farmers. Is the push to shut down the family farm in the UK directly related to the world government’s dangerous path to net zero?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Right now, there's this push poll with another area of really interest that was in the election was the net zero, the climate change, the green energy transition. And just recently, just a couple of days ago, we heard that Trump has picked Lee Zeldon of New York to run the EPA. That's going to be interesting pick. When you look through his background, he's not someone that is pro net zero. So we'll see how that works. But we're seeing these push in polls.

In the UK, they're having some really big issues there, particularly with their farmers. In 2022, the UK government actually offered to buy out farmers. This is at a time when food insecurity is at an all-time high. People have a hard time affording groceries. Good food is hard to come by. And this was the document actually right here from the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. They called it a direct payment to farmers.

This was an exit scheme to get them out of farming. that wanted to go, they would get this big lump sum of money to just stop farming. And I don't know if in the population there is going up because there is a lot of immigration and migration to the UK and to Europe in general. So it seems like kind of a ridiculous plan to slow down food, but it may not have worked because what's happening now is you're getting what's called a farm tax. And this is one of the headlines here, Jeremy Clarkston. Now Jeremy Clarkson has one of the top prime video original series called Clarkston's farm, and that's in the UK, he's very popular. Jeremy Clarkston accuses labor of shafting farmers in inheritance tax raid. It says under the current

rules, families can inherit businesses and farmland assets of any value without paying inheritance tax. But from April 2026, only assets up to one million pounds will be tax free with assets above this threshold qualifying for 50% tax relief, resulting in an effective 20% tax charge. So for over 30 years, farmers could, upon passing away, they shift that land, that family land that's been in the family for generations. They shift it to the next generation with no tax. They can keep farming. And farming is often, you know, these aren't billionaires rolling around in money.

These are people that are really working the land hard. They don't have a lot of extra money lying around. So a 20% tax basically can shut down, completely shut down farms. And this comes from Rachel Reeves. She's the Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is basically in the UK, like the chief financial minister. And she's only been in office a little over four months at that position. She's already making these sweeping tax laws that are really unheard of for over three decades

in the UK. And so here's the headlines. This looks like it's going to backfire massively. Some of the headlines here are death tax on farmers. threatened 5 million acres of British countryside. It says the average farm has 203 acres and is valued at 2.2 million pounds, according to analysis by accounting firm Safari. This means that farmers would need to sell 23 acres of land at the current market rate

of 11,000 pounds an acre in order to pay the bill, which would total up 246,000 pounds. Another headline, BBC tax change will be the death of the family farm. So you're seeing a big, big push to really shut down these family farms, despite the fact that the people pushing this, like Rachel Rees are saying, it's not going to affect a lot of people. This is just something to help our country. Well, why? Why is this happening? Well, one of the reasons it may be happening, I'll just go to some pictures. Check out some of these pictures of the UK countryside. You notice anything different? You notice all the farms that aren't there and they're replaced by these metallic, silvery, shiny things. Well, those are solar panels. And this is the other narrative that's running headlong into these farmers being essentially eliminated. Here's some of the headlines. This is Norfolk countryside under attack from solar panels warrants council leader thousands of acres of farmland at risk. Another one, this is Suffolk County Council. Council's shock at Solar Farm Go Ahead says the approval of this solar farm is a massive blow to local communities, agriculture, nature, and our landscape in the west of Suffolk. I am frankly shocked that the poorest

infrastructure application that have ever dealt with has now been approved. We highlighted numerous deficiencies in the submission. The voices of thousands of local residents, businesses, and organizations have not been listened to. This scheme will permanently and detrimentally impact the landscape of the vast part of West Suffolk and remove thousands of acres of land from food production. So what's happening right now is there's a lot of money, a lot of green energy money for solar panels for these net zero transitions to build on this land. and per acre of land, you can make way more with solar than you can with farmland. And so enter another UK government individual in this. So we have Rachel Reeves just putting the

pedal to the metal with the farmland exiting out of the UK. Then we have Ed Miliband, and he's the Secretary of State for Energy Security and what's called the net zero of United Kingdom. And Miliband is kind of taking it upon himself to just rubber stamp these gigantic solar panel farms that before he came in, they were held up because of regulations as they should be. And so here's the headline here, Britain's farmers brace for Miliband's solar shockwave. It says tenant farmers warn they face being cleared out as landowners sell up to net zero developers. And so this was happening in the UK.

So you're seeing from country to country, some countries are rapidly accelerating and just, you know, really kind of decimating the farmland because we've talked about in previous episodes here. These solar panels are not environmentally friendly. the batteries do not store energy for very long. So in the UK especially, you can have weeks at a time when the sun's not out, or, I mean, just at night, you're not getting the solar panel energy because you have to worry about these batteries. Huge questions about the transition and the technology here. But the UK is going full steam ahead.

It's interesting to see where the U.S. is going to go with this. Will they reverse these green energy policies or will they go in that direction? We do not know. But with Lee Zeldon coming in, you know, there's a hint of what direction. direction might be going. Yeah, I mean, you know, I read a great book unsettled and now we keep trying to get the author in here. But I mean, it points out how difficult it is to actually figure out climate science.

Can we bring up that photo again just of that farmland? Because as I saw it, you know, it brings up several thoughts that you have to have. If you're trying to measure your effect, mankind's effect on, you know, climate, if you will, just look at this image right here. Look how many mathematical equations are being affected here. one, you've mowed down all of the plants that actually take CO2 and turn it into oxygen. They're no longer there. Instead, you're replacing them with these black, shiny panels that are reflecting heat.

I have, you know, I have solar panels myself. They have heat that's bouncing heat back into, you know, into your atmosphere, which is heating it too. We know that, you know, just the dark color is absorbing and creating more heat in that space and affecting the surrounding areas. And then, so, you know, how are you going to figure, are we actually ahead? Did we make a net gain there? We lost the ability to convert CO2 to oxen by taking out the plants. We're overheating this area now.

And then, as you've said, this energy doesn't work at night. So you're still going to have coal-fired plants and things trying, if they still exist, or everything's going to be shut down in the middle of night. I mean, it's just where it, we are looking forward to a return to some sanity. and who's going to make our food. I mean, the irony is those solar plants are probably needed to run the factory down the road that is making factory meat and cricket meal and whatever disgusting pablam. They are deciding that is going to be our diet in the future

and probably taking far more energy to run that plant than to just let the plants grow out in this field. It's just, it's madness. And what happens to those solar panels and the wind turbines, when they need to be updated, when they're damaged. I mean, you're talking about now environmentally hazardous materials that need to be done away with, buried. There's a lot of questions there, too, that really haven't been answered at scale when you're looking at this large scale. So, you know, we're obviously going to be reporting on this and we're going to see from the ground here in the U.S. how that's going to work.