By Joe Stanley, Head of Farming, Training & Partnerships, Allerton Project
It will come as a welcome relief to the farming industry that Defra’s announcement on the 26th of January finally puts a significant amount of detail into the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) tier of the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme. SFI will be the element of ELM with which it is hoped the majority of farmers will engage, and lack of detail in this area has caused a huge amount of uncertainty and anxiety for those trying to plan for their businesses in the post-CAP landscape.
Six new SFI standards have been announced:
- Hedgerow standard
- Integrated Pest Management standard
- Nutrient Management standard
- Arable & Horticultural Land standard
- Improved grassland standard
- Low input grassland standard
These join the existing:
- Arable & horticultural soils standard
- Improved grassland soils standard
- Moorland standard
The key development between the existing and new standards is the removal of the tiered system within the original three standards – ‘Introductory, Intermediate and Advanced’. The new standards allow farmers to choose only the actions they wish to apply to individual parcels without having to sign up to entire packages of actions across the entire area entered into SFI, and this is a welcome element of flexibility. It’s encouraging to see the inclusion of 30 new actions, in addition to the 250 already available.
This ensures a wide range of choice across a wide range of farm enterprises and landscapes. Payments are included for omitting the use of insecticides within the IPM standard, which hopefully will encourage more uptake of nature-friendly farming practices – such as beetle banks and field margins – pioneered here at the GWCT Allerton Project.
The return of simple to manage grassy field corners from the old ELS scheme is also welcome, as they were hugely popular with farmers and delivered some significant environmental benefits at little effort. In short, there is much in the new standards to be welcomed, although with increasing numbers of SFI standards to be released, there remains the risk of individual schemes becoming highly complex and difficult to manage.
The fundamental issue remains however that the ambitions embedded in ELM, and wider government environmental policy, will be undermined without an appropriate and long-lasting budget which genuinely rewards farmers for the provision of public goods, while also allowing them to continue to produce high quality and sustainable food.
Significant questions remain in this area as to whether the old CAP budget – protected only for the duration of this parliament – is sufficient to the task, and whether payment rates are adequate to encourage farmers to engage with the scheme.
The GWCT Allerton Project has been at the forefront of the development of many of the measures outlined in SFI and Countryside Stewardship Plus, and looks forward to helping farmers make the transition to more nature-friendly and climate neutral farming practices in the coming months and years.
*The GWCT Allerton Project is a working research and demonstration farm on the Leicestershire/Rutland border, which since 1992 has pioneered the development of nature- and climate-friendly farming on our 320ha mixed estate. We welcome thousands of visitors every year to demonstrate our findings in areas from IPM to soil health, based around our modern visitor and training centre. We also offer BASIS accredited training. Contact us via The Allerton Project | Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (allertontrust.org.uk)