UK farmland: will the fields still be gold after Brexit?

I first started tracking the farmland market in the UK at the turn of the century when I joined Farmers Weekly magazine as its property editor. Back then decent farmland was priced at around £2,500 an acre. Fast forward to the present day and land routinely changes hands for more than £10,000 an acre.

According to the Knight Frank Farmland Index (I jumped the journo/corporate fence in 2008), the average price of bare farmland in England and Wales – that’s land with no houses or buildings on it, just crops or animals – was worth £2,037 an acre in 2000. It’s now £7,672 an acre – a rise of almost 280 per cent.

So what’s happened during that time to drive up prices? Farm incomes certainly haven’t risen by that kind of multiple.

Put simply, it’s down to the rather dull supply-and-demand equation. Very little farmland comes up for sale publicly, but there are plenty of reasons all sorts of different people want to buy it.