Jeremy's Blog 28th April 2023: The Life of the Profession
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 28th April 2023
Last Friday, the Suffolk Association of Agricultural Valuers marked its 175th anniversary with a breakfast at the Suffolk Food Hall hosting solicitors, accountants, tax advisers and other professionals for an event of both networking and briefing. The celebration was delayed by a year following the pandemic as the actual anniversary was last year. Suffolk is recorded as the oldest of the CAAV’s local associations, founded in 1847 and building on a local valuers meeting to develop answers for the tenancy problems of their areas. Its members have provided advice and agency for farmers, owners and others across the very varied years since – and is in evident good form for the future.
There are echoes across that history. De-linking means that English farmers and valuers are now working on their last land-based area direct payment application forms, 31 years after the mad scramble to get mapping in order for the MacSharry reforms. The link between the remaining payments and land or farming is to be broken for 2024.
Suffolk was founded in the year after the politically more traumatic repeal of the Corn Laws which had been in place for a similar length of time from the end of Napoleonic Wars. Supporting prices by setting a minimum price for imported grain, the Corn Laws were similarly seen as a guarantor of the agricultural interest. (1846 also saw the foundation of the Royal Agricultural College, where Gloucestershire and District celebrated its centenary last month in the company of the Princess Royal.) The Corn Laws went and, as it happened, strong produce markets saw a generation of agricultural prosperity; the high farming that paid for many of the old farmsteads that were useful for a century.
Then technology opened up supply chains from the Americas and the weather worsened, bringing agricultural depression from the mid-1870s, followed by the endeavours for two World Wars, the mechanisation of agriculture, post-War policy and the CAP. Suffolk has moved to larger farms, capital intensive businesses, few livestock and winter-sown crops. We are now looking afresh at policy change, climate issues and new technologies.
Nationally, Suffolk was one of the CAAV’s founding members in 1910 when turbulent times and politics called, as now, for a national voice with shared support and standards for valuers. Like all other local associations, it has contributed since. Archibald Lacy-Scott, President in 1943/44, was among those reshaping the CAAV for the post-War years – his name is still on the CAAV’s Memorandum of Association. Rowland Beaney, distinguished in dispute resolution, was President in 2010/11. Many more give time to committees, examinations and other parts of the CAAV’s life.
Looking round the breakfast at the Suffolk Food Hall, itself a tribute to Suffolk’s continuing farming heritage, the engaged meeting was testimony to the CAAV’s combination of fellowship and professionalism and the shared interests with the other professions with which valuers interact: the heritage of those 175 years giving strength to apply old skills and new knowledge to the challenges of the future. Suffolk’s founders could be proud.