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 11th 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.
In my case , my application was just waiting for me to make final checks but that has now been rendered a huge waste of time and money filling in the extremely complex forms.
So, no money for environment on my farm then, the several hectares of boundary strips that were going to be sown with a pollen and nectar mix will now be left fallow as the seed is too expensive to sow without the subsidy.
I will not crop these areas either as it is too late to successfully control the weeds and so on in these 6m wide strips to sow some barley which, at current prices will not pay at all either.
So the land will be left, no benefit to the environment or the food chain for humans.
Well done HMG, along with the Inheritance tax changes which means that when we die our children will have to sell our small farm to pay the tax, the change in the rules regarding pickup trucks and the recent doubling of the shotgun certificate cost (I have to have a gun only for welfare reasons, I don’t shoot anything but very sick animals) it seems as though the Government have a vindictive approach to the very people who provide most(just about) of the food everyone eats in this country.
It seems the BPS was too basic in what it covered but the state knew how much it was going to have to pay out in subsidy where as SFI was too complicated and uncapped so the budget for subsidy was not predictable – hence it was frozen.
Have I got this right?
If the applications for SFI were larger than the budget set where should the additional funding have come from?
Such a boon Brexit has been.
Remainer farmers have my sympathy
Brexit wouldn’t have been so bad if there had been some signs of competency in the civil service and HMG.
Ag policy in the remaining EU states is no better than here in the round with no chance of un-electing the people making a mess of it.
Pleased to see Dougle in the Dorset wildlife magazine, fame at last.
Jim A
I thought we had just unelected the incompetent government that triggered the form of Brexit that the NFU advised against but true a different form incompetency has replaced it.
How long did the previous government have to ‘take control’ of borders to reduce the quantity of imported food grown to different standards and rules?
Yet the EU managed to implement their regulations on importing many UK food exports – down 34% is it?