Rural Insurance partners with UK Agricultural Finance to offer a new source of funding

Rural Insurance has teamed up with specialist agricultural business lender, UK Agricultural Finance (‘UKAF’), to provide farmers and landowners with access to flexible and secured finance solutions.

New ways of farming that increase the financial yield per acre can bring other benefits, such as being more eco-friendly and sustainable. Currently, British farmers are not competitive with the Netherlands, which is the world’s second largest global exporter of food after the US.

One of Britain’s largest equity release firms has reported that the market hit a new record in 2016, after a fifth year of growth, with retired homeowners withdrawing over £2.1 billion of property wealth last year via some 27,600 plans. Clearly, the market for traditional equity release on residential property is booming, however when it comes to farms and the agricultural sector is this repeated? Searching the web suggests nothing is available and we find several instances of farming forums asking where to find equity release.

Savills recently published their research on Farmland Values in the Great Britain showed the combined 39.8 million acres of farmland in 2016 has been valued at £185.7 billion. In 2016 the available acreage for sale was circa 180,000 one of the lowest levels in the post war period.

A few weeks ago, DEFRA published its initial analysis of farming’s financial performance for England in 2015/16. As ever, there are statistics to suit everybody’s needs. What caught our eye was the Return on Capital Employed (‘ROCE’ pronounced so it rhymes with croquet).

National Grid is responsible for ensuring that the amount of power generated is matched to the amount demanded on the UK’s grid. This happens in real-time, so that the electricity supply remains at a safe frequency and household electrical appliances function properly. As such, there are peak usage times, which put considerable strain on the grid and this is set to get worse in the future. In response, National Grid is looking to commission energy storage facilities that smooth the flow and help match supply and demand.

Rural property demand was robust last year, despite the Brexit vote. Supply was generally muted, with landowners adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to the many potential policy impacts. While CAP subsidies are secure until 2020, and a weak pound boosted GBP commodity prices, the growing unpredictability makes income diversification far more important for all but the most profitable farms. As a result, potential buyers are increasingly discriminating between farmland’s underlying commercial value, its amenity value and its development potential.

With the inevitable changes that Brexit will impose on the UK farming industry, it’s worth looking at New Zealand’s approach, where almost all farming subsidies were removed in 1984, after years of protection by a government that had set production quotas, paid generous subsidies and dictated land use.