THE Tenant Farmers Association is calling on landlords to temper their demands for rent increases this autumn in a bid to stabilise market forces.

The effect of Farm Business Tenancies, introduced in 1995, has been an increasing turnover of tenant farmers over the past two decades as land owners seek to maximise the income from their land.

The flip-side has been tenants deterred from investing in the land, and therefore their business, by the uncertainty and increasingly short-term nature of their tenure.

With the traditional date for farm rent reviews – on September 29, known as Michaelmas – approaching, the TFA wants landlords to sit down and negotiate reasonably with their tenants.

Blanchland farmer Ken Lumley, a member of the TFA and past Northumberland branch chairman, said the organisation had received an alarming number of calls of late from farmers faced with the choice of either a significant rent rise or the non-renewal of their tenancies.

He said: “In the olden days, the law basically said the rent had to be what the farmers and the landlord agreed was fair based on the average value of the land, the productivity achieved on it and what the farmer was earning from it.

“But now with the Farm Business Tenancies, it’s just down to market value and the world being what the world is, there’s always someone willing to take on additional land on an FBT at an exorbitant level of rent – a landlord can then use that as a benchmark for existing tenancies.

“We’ve had a lot of tenant farmers ringing to say, look, this is just not sustainable. What are we going to do?”

Landlords had to realise they were shooting themselves in the foot with some of the rent rises being proposed.

A rent review could conclude in one of three ways – a reduction, an increase or a standstill. But in the event of the two parties failing to agree, arbitration always proved very expensive, resulting in bills that were often many times the amount of the difference between the two sides.

Common sense had to prevail, he said, in order to preserve a good relationship between landlord and tenant and ensure the latter were able to actually make a living.

And both sides would benefit from agreeing lengths of tenancy that offered some stability.