There is a memory from my childhood that returns to me often. It is of my parents standing by the television, watching the evening news and recoiling at the anti-farming rhetoric being reported that day.
It was the 90s, a time when dairy farmers were dealt blow after blow after blow.
There was the end of the milk marketing board (giving pricing control to the supermarkets); months on end of anti-farming activist lead protests at the ports; disease outbreaks of BSE, TB and later foot and mouth.
Dairy farmers felt like public enemy number one and the industry was not in a good place.
I can't remember the story being reported on this particular day, it could have been any of the above or something else, but their sense of despair still haunts me.
Several times this week we have walked in from the farm with our children in tow and a very similar scene has played out.
Our children have watched us listen in despair to the words coming out of Keir Starmers mouth as he accused farmers of selfishly trying to hold back essential funds needed to repair the NHS.
And again to reports from yesterday's meeting between the Treasury, Defra and farming representatives, where ministers shut down any hope of a turnaround insisting they were correct and that farmers should essentially, go away.
Untruth after untruth being spoken with total conviction by people who have been elected to lead us, people who have enough intelligence to know that the 'facts' they represent are wrong.
It feels like the worst and most underhanded form of betrayal imaginable.
There will be farmers in this country in a very dark place owing to what is being played out in Westminster at the moment.
The threat of an inevitable inheritance tax bill will hang over families like an unexploded bomb in the front yard, waiting to go off when the one who holds the deeds dies.
The Treasury say farmers should mitigate the impact through lifetime transfers to offspring or by sharing assets within a marriage.
What happens though when divorce looms (42% of UK marriages end in divorce) and your spouse leaves with half?
Or you hand down the farm and business to your son or daughter but the unthinkable happens and they die before you?
Your new son or daughter-in-law inherits the farm, takes over the business, remarries, has children and you have no say or involvement in what happens to your family farm.
Even with a lifetime residency agreement written into the transfer it may be too awkward or too painful for you to stay on the farm, but financially you may have no choice.
These are not solutions.
For those farmers who receive terminal diagnoses in the coming months with a prognosis post next April - they will know that they will not outlive the current government's term in power but are likely to live to see this policy come in.
Imagine the hell they will be living through. As if a death sentence isn't enough without feeling responsible for the loss of a multi-generational farming business and their surviving family's means to make a living. Imagine their potential thought process.
What terrifies me is the unreceptiveness of the Government to open debate, that they show no interest in compromise or in looking for alternative, workable solutions which could attain the same benefits to the public purse.
And most worrying of all, their blank refusal to partake in any form of meaningful consultation or dialogue with our industry.
Farmers are resilient enough to weather a storm, they are well practised. There has always been some threat or crisis impacting one sector of farming or another - disease, extreme weather, market challenges etc.
Through any of those things farmers have always mustered the confidence to plough on because it has always been possible for them to maintain hope.
Hope that the weather will settle, that the threat of disease can be controlled, that the markets will stabilise.
The inheritance tax policy is a very different threat to anything farming has faced before.
It leaves no room for optimism and has a finality that will mark the end of the line for hundreds of family farms.
No sector will escape: livestock, dairy, arable, horticulture it will swallow them all and without a government U-turn there is absolutely zero hope of things fully recovering.
This policy will change the agricultural landscape in this country forever, it will destroy our means to feed the population and leave us all completely at the mercy of our international neighbours.
This isn't just a threat to farming and farmers, this is a threat to all of us and on a scale that I don't think any of us will be able to fully comprehend until the consequences begin to unfold.
#together
#withourfarmers
#yellowwellies
#mindyourhead
