Yes, and then at a multi year low he sold it.
Thanks for the added background though.

PR

What fascinates me is that so many land-owning farmers have assets that could now make their heirs liable for IIHT (albeit at half the rate paid by the rest of us and payable over 10 years) and apparently barely make a penny profit, it seems. And yet, at the same time, they want their families to take over the business.

It's a mystery. If they do make so little profit on assets of several millions, they don't seem to be running much of a business. Shouldn't they be encouraging their families to sell up, perhaps to one of the many tenant farmers who would love to own their own farm, invest their resulting millions in the markets etc. as the rest of us do, and have more competent owners running their broken former business?

Or is it just that having to pay tax like the rest of us isn't a club they want to join?

Land like Gold has been a store of wealth since the dawn of time.
I am aware of many senior execs who are technically farmers and but also earn £1m+ bonus each year.

Visit an exclusive old gentlemans club and you will find many wealth landowners/farmers doing multi million pound deals all whilst wearing brown in town and sitting comfortably in a wingback draped with cow or two.

Those deals are not about their farming business but regading FTSE 100 companies. Yet schools are taught that brown in town is a no go (it needs to be black).

One of those gentleman/farmer/Lloyds of London exec just last week shook hands at a club and signed some paperwork to finalise buying his daughter (still at Uni) her first home. He was a bit miffed about the £800k stamp duty !

He has multiple properties around the world including a few in Mayfar, is mainly traveling on his yacht but his family farm has been with him for generations - for such people, land is the only asset which he can really trust and rely on. It has stood the test of time. Banks, insurance companies, corporations have all gone to the hilt but their farm has been handed down for centuries and accumulates in value.

I guess this is what they actually mean when they say that the wealthy invest in Real Estate, not the REIT's which are sold to normal investors. The wealthy do not buy financial instruments linked to Real Estate, they actually own real estate which they then leverage. This a far cry from being at the end of a margin call when your stock hits the proverbial. That is not. to say that they do not have stocks, bank deposits, art, wines, gold etc, but land, to them has been the source of their true wealth preservation vehicle which has increased in line and more with times and inflation. It is the asset which they actually trust for the long term and back in the 90's and 2000's he was simply buying more farmland £10k a pop and waiting till planning was granted (some have been granted others he is waiting).

On a slight tangent, my neighbor has just sold a slice of his garden on the side of his main residence for £350k with many covenants on what could be built there (max 3 bed bungalow/house - and given that size of the plot you would struggle to get a 3 bed property on it anyhow). So land as an investment does pay well.

The value of land is generally based on its potential to be used for purposes other than farming, as I understand it (green projects being one of them). So land values bear no relation to the profitability of the business. What does impact the bottom line (other than taxes, including higher taxes on fertilizer, not just IHT) are increasing costs due to inflation, and the cost of employing people, plus the ability of supermarkets to negotiate successfully to the extent that margins become very thin.

I'm not sure I understand why a tenant farmer buying the land (assuming they could afford to) would be any more competent than the current owners, in fact I don't see any evidence of widespread incompetence in the farming industry (or at least not to the same extent that it exists among politicians).

As regards the IHT, disagreements over how many farms are affected aside, an article today on Bloomberg (by John Stepek) suggested that the main issue with it is that it seems perverse to apply a tax that potentially destabilises an ongoing business, just at the time where it is having to manage succession. Merryn Somerset Webb has suggested that (in lieu of backtracking, which would be preferable), the government might consider only applying the tax should the farm and its assets be sold, with the tax liability tapering off over 20 years. Sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.

And your solution is?