There are few English farmers who will not by now have heard about the government’s brutal and abrupt halting of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) (extended offer) 2024 version at around 6pm on Tuesday 11^th March 2025.  Now it is time to try to explain to everyone else the consequences of this decision.

Background

Shortly after the 2024 autumn budget, DEFRA announced that the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), the legacy scheme from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), would be drastically and prematurely reduced to a stump during 2025.  BPS enabled UK (and other EU farmers) to produce food at far below the true cost of production for very many years. 

After Brexit, the government of the day promised a land of milk and honey, proposing the use of public money to pay for public goods, through the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMS), this would be made up of various strands, which would evolve as we progressed through the great Agricultural Transition.  BPS was given a withdrawal trajectory, was planned to finally expire in 2028, and farmers were promised that during this time a new range of environmentally focussed schemes would develop and be rolled out as BPS declined,  the central feature being the SFI.  This turned out to be optimistic to put it kindly.  The NFU had to repeatedly request an extension to BPS withdrawal as we saw endless delays in SFI rollout, but this fell on deaf (Tory) ears.  SFI appeared first as a pilot in 2022, available to a limited number of farmers, then as a fully functioning scheme in 2023, fully compatible with the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) control system, though only featuring a limited number of options to apply for.  All well and good, it worked, it paid out quarterly and quite a few farmers engaged with it.

Fast forward to late 2024, the SFI 24 extended offer appeared, with over 100 options to choose from, wildly complicated to apply for it turned out, some of the new options conflict with options in the SFI 23 scheme, and have to be removed by the RPA from their system before you can progress with an SFI 24 application.   In our own case this has delayed completion of our own application for the 2024 offer.

Then we had the budget, BPS was decapitated, which created a rumble of upset and worry throughout English farming, renowned Cumbrian shepherd and author James Rebanks said he believed that the progressive greener dream for UK farming had died.  I have tried hard not to agree with him, but am now very depressed by having to admit that I do.  

As we have heard, on Tuesday, Defra announced the sudden closure of the SFI 24 extended offer.  To withdraw what was originally described as a rolling application scheme, ie you can apply at any time in the year, within 5 months of the sudden decapitation of the Basic payment scheme, is heart-stoppingly shocking, and desperately sad.  The likely consequences are truly scary. There was no warning, or any hint that we should get a shift on with applications, one moment the scheme was open ended, then suddenly it was cut off, this action has further shattered what little remained of the trust of those farmers who are trying to provide food for the nation, in a more sustainable way than ever before, and at the same time trying to run profitable businesses.  Very sadly it can only demonstrate what a shallow understanding the government has of how food is produced in the UK.  

We had been fooled into believing that SFI would expand as BPS declined, at the same time encouraging us to produce food in less damaging ways.  Many farmers have committed a great deal of energy to new ways of farming, using countryside stewardship (CS) and SFI as a backstop whilst they explore new ways of growing food in a less damaging fashion than before.  This is a terrible betrayal of farmers who are bold enough to try to do the right thing.  

It is incredibly difficult to wean yourself off the high nitrogen/pesticide/intensification treadmill, and without the support of schemes like SFI it will never happen, so the damage to soil, water and environment will continue.  

In our own case, we have a new application for SFI 24 waiting for us to press the button, sitting on the RPA system, whilst we check and recheck that the huge commitment it represents, on top of the schemes we already committed to over the last 15 years, is achievable.  Our application has been held up while the RPA made adjustments to many of our fields due to rotational offers from the SFI 23 scheme which conflict with the SFI 24 scheme.  Eg: the no insecticide option (IPM4) cannot run alongside the low input cereal option (AHW10) in the newest iteration of the scheme, on the same piece of land.  Arguably the whole thing is too complicated, but we are learning to work with it.  Now it is gone before it had barely begun, and will be replaced by something else, but not until 2026 we are told. DEFRA has suddenly pulled the plug, with no warning, or deadline or reasonable explanation.  We will actually be worse off than we were last year.

SFI options such as no insecticide, low input cereals, companion cropping, bird food, cover crops and many others, which are all aimed at giving farmers the confidence to farm in a less damaging fashion, have now disappeared for new entrants, and they are left with little option but to remain in or return to the high input systems that have been proven to be so damaging to soil, water and climate.  It is such a short sighted move, destroying trust, and entrenching the old fashioned view that “this is how we’ve always done it and I’m not changing now”.

Farmers take a long time to make changes to their systems, and there are a great many who haven’t engaged at all with CS or SFI yet, one can understand their hesitancy when you see huge seemingly arbitrary decisions like this made in an instant.  Trust has been shredded.  Those farmers really are going to be in the financial mire now, and there is absolutely not a hope of dragging them into the modern world where we take care not to pollute, to enhance the environment, to improve soils etc etc, whereas previously SFI was going to do that, eventually.  There is clearly not a shred of understanding in government of what is going on in the countryside.

Many farmers have dipped their toes into Countryside Stewardship on its 5 year timescale, and will have been waiting for their agreements to expire before then moving wholesale into SFI.  What are they supposed to do now?  This a very sad continuation of the destructive outcomes of past decades of ag policy.  The last government put a lot of effort into building something that would last, would wean us off flat rate area subsidies, and direct public money into public goods.  SFI 23 worked remarkably well, maybe they over extended their ambition a bit with the extended offer for SFI 24, but to drop it completely when so many are still putting applications together defies all common sense, will destroy trust and create huge cynicism and suspicion.  

The decapitation of BPS last autumn was bad enough, and SFI was supposed to be the safety net to help us through that.  To then destroy that safety net is a betrayal of monstrous proportions.  That the government fails to understand anything about farming is terrifyingly exposed by this move, what is their true desired direction of travel for food, nature and climate?  All the things they have said to us, from Starmer “having our backs covered” to DEFRA secretary Steve Reed’s speech at NFU conference ring utterly hollow now.

Back to Jan-Feb 2025 post

The View from the Hill                                                                      

A close look at these calves’ tag numbers gives away the fact that these are not in fact twins, however much you want to believe that they are. It is remarkable how the coloured eye rings have passed down through the generations from the six heifer calves that we bought from the Booth family in Dewlish a dozen years or more ago, the originals where black, but our red bulls have for the last two years been injecting a little more colour into the herd, after many years of black Angus breeding.  This heifer mother is herself one of the first progeny of Theo our red Hereford bull, bought in 2022, hence her red coat and white face, then she was run with Mr Red our red Angus bull last summer, to calve herself at two years of age, a few weeks ago.

Here is Theo, enjoying the attention of a school visit on a fresh sunny morning in February.  He loves having his head and neck rubbed, but you wouldn’t want to be the same side of the fence as him, he is too big and strong to trust.

The heifers finished calving about 10 days ago, and this week the rest of the cows have started.  It makes life simpler to deal with the first timers before the rest start to drop their precious loads, in case they need extra attention.

The bird food plots are still standing remarkably well after a whole winter’s weather, although you have to search hard to find many seeds left.  We have found we get much better results if we sow bird food plots on new ground every year though   this makes crop planning tricky in the rest of the field.  The bird food plots need to be sown in May or June, and must be left in place until at least mid February, meaning that they can only sown in fields destined for spring crops and have to be followed by a spring crop too, which is difficult because approximately 40% of the farm is sown in spring, and 60% sown to winter crops.  Hence the fact that all too often they are sown in the same place year after year, but the ground then gets weedier and weedier.  It is hard to control the weeds because the seed mixture is diverse, with several different species.  Most weedkillers are specific, so will kill at least some of the mixture.  A stale seedbed and clean ground is the best way to success, and so the debate goes on, round and round and round.

A project is underway to survey the river Stour along the stretch covered by our Cluster group, roughly Hinton St Mary to Blandford.  Funding has been obtained for this work, which we have been keen to use, it will involve a walk-over survey by not for profit organisation For Love of Water (FLOW).  They will assemble the data they collect into an interactive map, and in addition to that we are adding drone pictures of the river, which can be stitched together to form a continuous ribbon and can be then embedded in the digital map.

Along the way we are collecting interesting pictures as seen above, which shows Bryanston church, with the big house in the background (Now Bryanston School) formerly the seat of the Portman family, until 1928.  The Stable block can been nestling in the trees.

The magnificent breadth of the Stour valley, from Shillingstone looking south east towards Stourpaine in the distance, with Hanford School and the Hanford Farms Dairy in the centre.

So many bends and so many trees.  It’s hard to believe we managed to paddle this 10 years ago, the river is very overgrown in many places now.  From Stur to Blandford felt like double the distance it is by road. What would a beaver do?

The delightful view of an active building site, Bryanston Holt taking shape on what was formerly part of Lower Bryanston Farm, on the outskirts of Blandford.

A lovely picture of a Kestrel, by our expert long shot Mr Wicks, looking far too beguiling to be the same species as the murderous beast caught at lower res by a less skilled operator, tearing a dead rat to shreds in the farm yard.

For nerds and engineers who may be interested, we have been overhauling the main top conveyor in our grain store.  It was manufactured by Braintree company Carier, for those who like to know these things, and was installed in 1980.  Apart from a few running repairs it has served us very well, moving countless thousands of tons of grain since then.  It is a flow and return model, meaning that it carries wet grain on its upper level from the holding bins to the drier, which must be kept full at all times to stop the hot air escaping, and the surplus (overflow) is carried back to the bins on the lower level.  The conveyor is in simplicity a long metal box, with 2 levels, approximately 60 feet long.  It contains a continuous chain with flights, driven by an electric motor connected to a reduction gearbox by rubber belts.  At the far end, the chain runs around an idler sprocket.  You can see how worn the old sprockets were in the picture.  The combination of this wear and the wear of the chain itself had resulted in a dreadful noise which developed during last harvest, as chain and sprocket were not disengaging properly.  There was also what looked like an bend in the drive shaft, making the gearbox wobble menacingly.  In the past we have called on professionals to do this kind of job, but with many years’ experience of fixing this kind of kit, are we not professionals ourselves, who should be more than adequately equipped to deal with it?

The first major problem facing us was that the business end of the conveyor stuck out into space beyond the end of the existing service catwalk, where it was impossible to work on safely.  Equally hazardous, the idler end was high in the roof such that you could only reach it by perching on the sloping top of the drier, only 2 feet away from a thirty foot vertical drop.  So job number one was to get Drew in to construct safe extensions to both ends.  This took some head scratching, but in the end he devised a metal framework hung from the roof, similar to the original (but too short) upper platform, to which he then fixed timber beams, and finally some sturdy floorboards.  Scaffolding and several temporary beams enabled safe installation of these extensions, and then we were able to safely attack the conveyor.  Another in a long line of Drew triumphs.  It feels like Christmas every time I go up there. 

On dismantling it became clear that we would need new chain and sprockets, and obtaining these for a machine built 40 years ago, by a company that went bust more than 20 years ago, might prove tricky.  We looked at replacing the whole conveyor, but £20,000 seemed a bit steep, when the body of the machine, and indeed the motor, gearbox and shafts, were still in pretty good fettle.  Well Mr Google played his part and we found a specialist who could supply all the parts, it would take 8 weeks, and the new sprockets would arrive as blanks, ie the hole in the middle would have to be machined out to suit the exact size of the shafts in our machine.  Fortunately the clever lads at Dorset Tractors know just the fellow, an artist with a lathe and all the other kit to turn a lump of steel into something useful.  A 3D printer just wasn’t going to cut the mustard on this occasion. 

After a week or two, the sprockets arrived back, shiny and ready for installation.  Carrying 110 foot of chain in 10 foot sections up three flights of stairs was a little tedious, but laying it out and joining the sections together was almost exciting.  Fitting the gearbox back to the shaft properly, with the bushes and key in the right places, and new bearings throughout, resulted in it running sweet as a nut, before we then fitted new belts and pressed the button….. It works, and runs beautifully, quiet and with hardly any clonking at all.

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Whilst clearing out the farm office for a well deserved re-decoration, Will found an ancient can of Malthouse bitter lurking at the back of a cupboard, dated 1990 on the bottom of the can. No one else fancied it, but I thought I’d have a go, it was still very fizzy, and surprisingly clear after 35 years, but suddenly lost my enthusiasm when I saw the sediment that dribbled out into the glass.

Our farm workshop roof, from the top of the scaff tower, in place so our Sparky Tim could safely install some lovely bright new LED light fittings. We can now see right into the back of the shelves when searching for essential spare parts……

The elevated vantage point, aided by the new lights, also gave us an embarrassing view of the top of the shelves. What a mess. The boys have their eyes on this disgrace, keen to sort the treasure from the junk, I’m holding my breath.

For those with an interest in how politics affects farming, I have written a separate post about this week’s bombshell news of the government’s sudden and unexpected removal of the 2024 Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme. SFI has become the centrepiece of support to farmers in England to encourage them to farm in a more sustainable fashion. This action by Defra is likely to be quite consequential, as you will find if you click the link. Safety warning: it is possible I should have left a little more time and space before writing about it………

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