It was the cup of coffee that did it. After an awkward late evening lambing, I felt an overwhelming need for a cuppa to celebrate a successful delivery of an enormous single.

Despite knowing the effect that caffeine has on my body (inability to get to sleep and a hyperactive bladder), I mistakenly thought this would be different. And so when lying wide awake at 3am, all the small anxieties in my life multiplied into insurmountable challenges.

Concerns

Except instead of worrying needlessly about insignificant issues, I actually did have a couple of overhanging concerns that aren’t going away anytime soon.

Some folk might consider itchy sheep and inheritance tax to be mere blips that are dealt with by a few phone calls and some confident management decisions. But in the middle of the night, small problems become hugely magnified and any sort of sensible solution just seems impossible.

Scratching

About 10 days after housing my pregnant ewes, I noticed some of them scratching themselves. Not badly, but in a pen of 24, two or three of them seemed slightly uncomfortable.

I told myself it was probably the older straw that I was bedding them with and perhaps a few creepy crawlies had made their homes inside the bales.

But this theory was a bit weak and as the days progressed the sheep seemed to be getting worse.

I didn’t see how it could have been scab, since they hadn’t been in contact with neighbouring flocks, and bought-in breeding hoggets had shown no signs for five weeks after purchase.

But after another few days of observation, I knew something unpleasant was going on.

Three hours of rumbling around the bed, imagining bald sheep rubbing themselves on fences and gates (I told you; it’s always a hundred times worse in the dead of night) convinced me to do something.

Meeting

Next morning I spent a small fortune on Cydectin 2% LA and treated every animal on the farm. In less than 48 hours I’m certain there was a visible reduction in the scratching. Which of course begs the question – assuming it was sheep scab, where did it come from? Because I honestly have no idea.

In the middle of the itchy sheep situation, we had a meeting with my accountant.

It was primarily to discuss end of year tax planning, but also to talk about the Inheritance Tax laws and how to deal with them.

The upshot of that get together was that I couldn’t have been any more wrong if I’d asked the dog for his opinion.

I had been employing the old, “sure it’ll be fine, things always turn out not so bad in the end” approach.

This view, it seems, was erroneous in the extreme.

The accountant put up a prepared spreadsheet on the computer and began asking us for a few valuations.

Doesn’t count

Most of my responses began with, “but surely that doesn’t count, does it?”, and him looking at me as you would a three-year-old child. Susan seemed to be a bit more switched on (wives usually are) and pointed out that perhaps I was also undervaluing certain items.

The rented house in the yard, for instance, is a bungalow, built at the start of the 1960s and when I calculated that it was really only worth site value, he read me like an open book. Land, buildings, livestock, savings, working capital, yards, machinery and financial investments that I had thought bombproof are all harvested under Rachel Reeves’ broad umbrella and are considered fair game for Labour’s money grab.

He then made the suggestion that we should get an official valuation of the whole place and know exactly how vulnerable our life’s work is going to be worth.

Going by rough and ready calculations, we are currently staring down the barrel of having to fork out over £100,000 unless mechanisms are put in place to distribute land, property, and perhaps even money too.

Liability

A valuer is coming to see us next week, and there is every likelihood that the inheritance tax liability will be much worse.

This is an 80-acre farm with similar assets to many other farming families, it is not a 600-acre estate.

In accountancy terms, it seems that a 50-acre farm, with one dwelling and moderate assets, just about manages to stay below the tax threshold.

Ball-rolling

That meeting gave us an enbormous amount of food for thought. In some ways I feel less anxious about the situation now that we have started the ball rolling to deal with this problem.

What exactly we are going to do is another matter – even if we manage to lower our valuations by redistributing land or buildings to our children, it still feels like something to cause many more sleepless nights, coffee or not.