A former racing driver who returned to the family farm in Suffolk to start a new career fears he could become a casualty after a "devastating" Budget for farmers.

Jon Watt, 27, joined dad, David, on the family's 160ha arable and beef farming business at Laxfield, near Eye, in 2019, where they they are contract and tenant farmers.

Farmers and landowners are mulling their future after chancellor Rachel Reeves announced changes to Agricultural Property Relief (APR) and Business Property Relief (BPR) from April 2026.

Under the new rules farm businesses will need to pay a tax rate of 20% of agricultural assets valued over £1m.

Farmers fear they may have to sell their family farms to pay the Inheritance Tax bill - from which they were previously exempt.

The knock-on effect is that tenant farmers such as Jon and David are now unsure about their own futures.

Many tenant farmers fear that landowners could be forced to sell up, leaving the farm business in limbo.

“If the tenancy is ended, I will have wasted the last five years building up this farm business," said the Britcar champion, who gave up a promising career as a professional racing driver to pursue his farming career. 

“This tax benefits nobody. Family farms who have farmed for generations risk going out of business, which is heart-breaking.

“The taxes those businesses and their staff generated for the government and the business they created for others will be lost.

“The environmental work these farmers are doing to protect the countryside will no longer happen and it will greatly impact farmers’ ability to deliver national food security.”

This year, Jon became part of the National Farmers' Union (NFU) Student and Young Farmer Ambassador Programme. 

(Image: Toby Lea/NFU) The NFU has warned that with the average farmer’s return on capital invested less than 1%, there are widespread concerns this could force farmers to sell their family farms to pay the Inheritance Tax bill.

George Dunn, chief executive of the Tenant Farmers' Association (TFA), has warned that the tax change could lead to a significant amount of land disposals from private estates, as was seen when death duty rates caused the break-up of rural estates in the middle 20th century.

“Such disposals would be immensely damaging to the let sector of agriculture," he warned.

"It is hugely frustrating that the chancellor did not choose to accept the TFA’s proposal to allow 100% inheritance tax relief to all land let for periods of 10-plus years.  

(Image: Toby Lea/NFU)

"That would have driven more sustainable farm tenancies, created a secure rural economy and protected traditional let estates, while hitting those landlords who continued to take a short-term approach to the management of their land.”

The NFU and other groups are disputing Treasury claims that 73% of APR claims are below £1m and so would be unaffected.

They point to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (DEFRA) own figures which show that only 34% of farms are under £1m net worth.

The Treasury’s figures are based on past APR claims and do not consider farms that have also claimed BPR for diversified aspects of their businesses, the NFU pointed out.

They also include a substantial number of smallholdings, with 27% of those Treasury figures being for assets under £250,000, and another 23% under £500,000.

“The government has got this badly wrong if they think they are taxing the wealthy," said Jon.

“Just because a farm has more than £1m of assets, it does not mean the farmers themselves are wealthy people.

“This is just the value of the assets needed for a farm business to produce food."

He said farming is "an amazing career" - but warned the Budget decisions could bring big change that was "devastating" to farmers.

“We have been blatantly lied to by the government. They said they would not remove APR and BPR, but they have done it anyway.

“In farming we need to make decisions for the long-term, so it is incredibly frustrating when things keep changing all the time.

“When they say one thing and do the complete opposite it removes that stability and confidence to invest in the future.

“The government needs to go back and reverse the decisions they have made.”

NFU members will be gathering on Tuesday, November 19, for a meeting in London.