What % of u.k farmland,estates were/are bought with money from farmin?

my great grandmother was a school teacher her husband was dead and she had 3 young boys and 2 girls. She worked night and day to keep the small hill farm her husband rented. My grandfather and his brothers worked that til they were in their teens. after a few years she got a job in another school and they had to move to a new area, same again rented a small hill farm of 70 acres. They walked 4 miles to it everyday. In 1920 they ended up buying it outright. Farmed it and rented land for a few more years saved every penny bought another farm of 120 acres. They sold 30 acres of the 'new farm' to the forestry service and it paid the farm off and bought a butchers shop. In 1945 the brothers bought our 80acre 'home farm' borrowing £7000 from a wealthy land owner. Once that farm was paid they all went their own way. One brother died in his forties, one brother never married and my grandfather got the lot (he was the only one out of the 5 to get married and have a family). My grandfather gave my dad and my two uncles a farm each, ours is the only one remaining. With out a teachers wage 100+ years ago i doubt they could have done anything. it would have put the food one the table and clothes on their back thats it but it was still a boost.

if you buy 100 acres with farming money then 15 years later sell 20 acres for building and buy 300 more acres is it all farming money
many farmers to day who own the farm because a previous generation was lucky and bought the farm when the land was cheap by todays prices

many estates sold out to pension funds in the 1970s when land got above £500 because they were advised to
many of the estates around to day are because they did not take the quick money and invested in their assets

farmers who want to farm would all be better off with low land prices the cost of paying out siblings will finish off many family farms

The cotton mills and carpet makers of Yorks/Lancs bought some big estates back in the day and let's not forget the Church which is(or was,maybe things have changed recently but not to my knowledge) a very large landowner and similarly Oxford&Cambridge Universities..there was a time when you could walk from one city to the other on their land..(The large country house near here was owned by a porn baron fairly recently so things have changed..)

Think that is an urban myth about being able to walk from Oxford to Cambridge on their land. But the fact remains that they are a big landowner in this part of the World. College lands were mainly gifted to them, going back as far as Henry 8ths time I believe.
Although Balliol has liquidated about all it's land holdings since the 1940s.
Couple of colleges including I believe Trinity, appear to be enjoying a day in the sun at the moment around Banbury, and it remains to be seen if they are buyers of land still.

My X 6 grandfather invested his;http://www.nelsonsnavy.co.uk/broadside5.html in his Staffordshire patch. He wasn't home mutch as Britain was at war with Spain & France for a long time. This filtered down to the eventual loss of my mothers Essex farm in the 1953 floods.
SS

Ours was in late 70's

Wonder what it was that created such an ' environment of agricultural prosperity ' ?

"During the seventeenth century Bonsall made strides away from its feudal past, establishing its independence by buying out the rights of the King to exact manorial obligations."
This means farmers became 'copyholders' which is an early formof freehold. A lot of the money in Bonsall came from lead mning. Gradually, over the years, the number of farms has shrunk, and unividual farms have become bigger, the extra land purchased with money from farming.

When land and housing are untaxed and unregulated, capital values soar, as they did in victorian times up till about 1900.
Taxation and land reform after ww1 along with global recession led to falls till ww2, then the 1947 ag act drove the speculators out of land and gave farmers a chance to buy. How many landowning farmers today still remember the labour party for that?
Thatcher set about deregulating property with the 88 housing bill, abolishing secure tenure and rent control, resulting in todays property disaster.
The 95 ag act did the same for farming with fbt

Plenty land bought with money from tobacco, alcohol and especially drugs in the past. What did you do with all that cash when there were no Ferraris? Bought an estate to help with tax and prove to the world that you were a success

There is a large run down estate near lockerbie bought with profits from the heroin opium trade to china

Mum in law is history researcher and most estates were into practices that wouldn't be legal now.
Dad wanted to farm in 50's and Grandad was very sharp and got govt to pay for the farm as they were able to offset the losses on the farm, in the first few years, against his income tax from full time job off farm.

glasshouse said:

There is a large run down estate near lockerbie bought with profits from the heroin opium trade to china

Click to expand...

If you watched Who Do Think You Are with Matthew Pinsent you would have seen that Jardine Matheson ran much of Shanghai including 20 million Chinese who used the opium dens they owned. Massive profits for their shipping -tea out and opium in. The Chinese got fed up of it and the government sent troops to protect the trade. Imagine if a current drug dealer asked for tropps to protect his income?
Anyway, as you say, a lot of that money was laundered - though legally at that time -into buying land around Dumfries 100 years ago.

1. The Forestry Commission
2,571,270 acres
Owned by the Government-which wants to privatise it-on behalf of the public, Britain’s largest land manager leases 208,895 acres of the 2.5 million acres in its care. Created in 1919, the Forestry Com-mission looks after 1.4 billion trees and has helped to expand Britain’s woodlands by an area more than three times the size of Greater London in the past 20 years.

2. The National Trust
630,000 acres
With more than 350 historic houses, gardens and monuments in its care, as well as tracts of coastal, farm- and moorland, the Trust remains one of our most important national institutions. Indeed, 14 million people visit its ‘pay for entry’ properties every year.

3. Defence Estates, for the Ministry of Defence
592,800 acres
More than two-thirds of Defence Estates’ land is considered to be ‘rural estate’ and is held solely for the purpose of training the armed forces. Encompassing 3,600 sites, the land-which makes up 1% of the UK’s land mass-includes 171 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), 700 scheduled archaeological monuments, 50,000 service homes and more than 800 listed buildings. It also has more than 700 rural tenants and licensees.

4. The Pension Funds
550,000 acres
Many of the UK’s 2,800-plus major pension funds have invested in land for hundreds of years, attracted, no doubt, by a possible rental income of more than 7% per annum.

5. Utilities: water,electricity, railways
500,000 acres
Although it has proved impossible to break down the exact acreage of land owned by the UK’s 18 energy, 22 water and 32 rail companies, we estimate the total acreage (think of huge power stations such as Didcot, reservoirs such as Bewl Water and water-treatment works such as the new Thames Barrage site) comes to about half a million acres.

6. The Crown Estate
358,000 acres
There is no other organisation
in the world quite like The Crown Estate. With a portfolio worth more than £6.6 billion, it encompasses a wide variety of land, from beef farms in the north of Scotland to offices in the West End of London, from Portland stone mining in Dorset to forests in the West Country, as well as much of the UK’s coastline and some of the sea bed.

It also boasts significant holdings in London’s Regent Street, Regent’s Park and St James’s, as well as agricultural estates of 265,000 acres (made up of 780 tenancies), including the 15,600-acre Windsor estate. Although the rural land holding estate amounts to 358,000 acres, if the acreage of the sea bed, foreshore and urban estate were factored in, the land-ownership figures could stretch to millions of acres.

The Crown Estate ‘belongs’ to the reigning monarch, but it is not the private property of The Queen or the Government. It is independently managed, and its surplus is revenue that is paid to the Treasury. The monarch receives a fixed annual payment in return, which we call the Civil List.

7. The RSPB
321,237 acres
The RSPB is not only mighty in terms of its one million-plus membership, its 200 nature reserves cover about 321,237 acres of UK land. Founded by volunteers 121 years ago, the organisation-which is now one of the UK’s richest charities-is continuing to grow at a rapid rate of knots. Last year, The Scotsman reported that RSPB Scotland’s landholding had increased to 124,000 acres from 87,000 acres in 2000, making it the eighth biggest landowner in Scotland.

8. The Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry
240,000 acres
Queensberry and Langholm estates in Dumfriesshire, Bowhill in Selkirk-shire, Boughton in Northamptonshire and Dalkeigh Palace, on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

9. The National Trust for Scotland
192,000 acres
The National Trust for Scotland has, in the past, acquired large areas of land that are bequeathed to it. However, due to recently exposed financial difficulties, it is expected to limit the amount of land it takes on in the future.

10. The Duke of Atholl’s trusts
145,700 acres
The Atholl estate in Perthshire.

First OJ came to the village as a labourer in 1701. By 1735 he had an osier bed for basket making. A freeman of the parish. Shift on to late 1800's OJ's were woodmen and hurdle makers on the estate. Started farming as tenants in late 1800's, moved to present farm in 1906.my Grandfather,the youngest of 12, a lad of 16. Still making hurdles as my grandfather met my grandmother delivering hurdles.
The estate sold in 1946 and grandfather, having just been through the depression, did not want to buy a farm. Father, only a 19 yr old, pushed him to buy, which he did.
Grandfather died 1967 And left 130 acres and a portfolio of shares that he had built up.
Father bought another 170 acres in 1970 and over the years we and I have added more , little by little, and now farming over five times what grandad left. Never sold anything for building, all bought out of farming.
Think grandfather paid £20/acre, most I paid was £3,500 in 96, paid £2,500 in 2006.
We paid £247/acre in 1970 for the 170 acre farm and looking back through the deeds, it was sold for more than that, per acre in 1870!

In 3 generations we have always managed to buy land from farming income over the last century, however an element of luck and good timing has been essential. Patience is also very important and if at first you don't succeed then try, try again.

My father managed to acquire land that was derelict in the early 30's and when WW 2 started in 1939 he had to evacuate the land as it was flooded by the sea. The sheep were rehomed some 3 miles away. After the war he reclaimed this land again and added other areas where the farmers had got out. He was always involved in dealing and trading of livestock and as such did quite well.
It was the 1970's when a lot of land was purchased as #Romneymarsh mentions, in fact his father and mine did a deal where we bought land from the same landlord as we were sitting tenants.

In the early 70's land had increased in value with many pension funds etc buying up land as it was very tax efficient to purchase it. Father tried to buy a farm in 1970 but was outbid, however by 1973 this had already gone bust and managed to buy the same farm (300 acres) however the purchase wasn't completed until early 1975 when land prices were once again rising and it was the time when sheep prices went through the roof as we joined the EU. Father took out an overdraft to buy the farm and by good fortune paid off most of it in a year and of course was set against tax!! (The farm was only just over a £1,000 per acre.

While we have continued to buy small areas of land since this time, it is insignificant and these days tend to rent land. However I believe I can see a possibility that we will once again start to see opportunities in the next few years post Brexit.

C

MX7 said:

Many thanks for all your very interesting posts.
Some have you have quite rightly mentioned foreign investors buying uk farmland. Please can someone tell me what criteria foreigners have to comply with before they can by a house / farmland in the uk if they are not resident here in the uk .

Click to expand...

Criteria?
You are joking
They only need a wad of cash