A new campaign aims to 'defend' family farms and rural businesses following the government's controversial autumn budget.
The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has launched the campaign, calling on farmers, landowners and rural firms to 'fight back'.
It follows the budget which proposed changes to agricultural property relief and business property relief, pulling some 70,000 farms into paying inheritance tax.
Despite the government saying it was protecting small family farms, and even with the combined threshold of £1m and the 50% relief, the inheritance tax would affect family farms, the CLA warns.
For example, a diversified farm with 250 acres of land would have to find more than £250,000 to pay death duties.
The CLA, which is urging farmers to sign its online letter, says that would be a 'catastrophic drain' on business resources.
"Rachel Reeves’s 2024 budget has the potential to be deeply damaging for British farming, land management, food security and environmental recovery," the body says.
"By completing the form, you will be signing a letter which will be sent to your local MP on your behalf."
The CLA also warns that the real term cut to the agriculture budget in England would mean that the UK government's targets for nature would be 'impossible to deliver'.
And the delinked payment in 2025 in England was 'much lower than could be expected or planned for in cash flow projections'.
"This will hamper our ability to grow our businesses, deliver for food and the environment, and it undermines the stability of our rural communities," the CLA says
"To enable farmers and rural business owners to invest for the long term, the government needs to give us certainty that it will uphold its end of the bargain."
It concludes: "We ask you to press the chancellor to change course and instead build a rural economy that can feed the nation, improve the environment, create good jobs and generate economic growth."
Farmers across the UK will descend on central London later this month as part of a rally against the budget which they say will have a 'devastating' impact.
Organised by the NFU, the 'mass lobby of MPs' will take place at the Church House conference centre in Westminster, on Tuesday 19 November.
