I have been on the road abroad a lot recently travelling with a farming project in Eastern Europe and, thankfully, have missed out on a lot of the reported mixed weather.

This wet weather has been an upside for us getting an almost perfect germination of crops across the farm. With strong stands, the daily war against rabbits is ongoing with us only marginally ahead. We have stood almost 2km of 4 strand electrified temporary fencing with a further 700m going up this week. Nobody likes this job and I was pretty happy to have been away when round one took place.

With the relative lull between crop planting and bulb harvest in June, the retreat to the office has been slower than it should be. We have been moving to a Limited structure for the last six months but the hectic season has slowed progress.

This bit part changeover has left us with a fairly intricate web of accounting cross charges, etc., to unwind to get everything across to the new limited company.

It seems like a populist move with all the hype around limited structures but our rationale is purely the figures. We got hammered for a few consecutive years and became quite adept at producing losses.

Now that we have produced some black numbers, we are finding our tax losses are getting low and a tax bill is the offing.

This is good news and bad news. Paying tax means you’ve made money which is good. The bad news is that it’s a nightmare to have the cashflow right leading in to paying any revenue liability and, while interest is tax deductible, the capital isn’t which we have a good chunk of belonging to one of our lenders. We are trying to divert all our surplus cash into high return areas such as seed, fertiliser, fuel and labour for growing crops. Tax naturally enough isn’t that attractive of an area of investment for us!

The new company will essentially be an operational company with the major fixed assets, such as land, staying in personal hands.

It will make future succession and new entrants and exits from the business a lot easier. Hopefully we will have some more black numbers to justify its existence.