By Alastair Leake Director of Policy and the Allerton Project.
There’s a lot of talk about the closure of the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme. The SFI has not ended. Because the scheme was so good farmers have piled into it enthusiastically and all the money is now committed.
It is good news that take up is higher than ever before and shows the potential for SFI to make a real impact on reversing biodiversity decline and be a world leading example of government funding farmers to deliver public goods. Furthermore, we can’t complain, as people did in the past, that the government were failing to get the money out to farmers and then complain again when they do, and it all gets used up!
So, the SFI continues to be fully funded with those signed up getting their payments as per their contracts. Unfortunately, that means that those who have not entered the scheme find themselves suddenly and unexpectedly locked out.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to contemplate how somebody within Defra or the government did not consider the possibility of over-subscription and give some thought as to how that might be managed. Clearly not. And what makes this particularly damaging is the loss of confidence and uncertainty that this has created at a time when BPS payments have all but disappeared, farm input costs are up, crop prices lack-luster and yields are down, driven by extremely challenging weather. So just when we needed a bit of certainty it appears as if Defra have watched the last pound of the £2.5 billion be claimed, then slammed the door.
And there is worse to come. What is going to happen to all those farmers, including us at the Allerton Project, who had signed up to the Countryside Stewardship scheme, which pre-dated the SFI, whose agreements expire at the end of 2025? At the moment they have no new scheme to apply to and that means the land which is currently delivering funded environmental benefits, will no longer be funded and will likely be ploughed up and returned to crop production as the only means of earning income from it.
Remember, these are forward thinking farmers who embraced doing environmental work long before the withdrawal of BPS and the SFI “Public money for public goods” approach. There’s a lot of us too. Because experience taught us that any new scheme is always plagued by teething problems, as the SFI has been, we and many others signed ourselves up to a 5-year mid-tier Countryside Stewardship agreement in 2020 only to emerge at the other end to be met by a closed door, when we expected to be joining a smoothly operating new scheme.
The strips of wild bird seed mix which have contributed to the doubling of songbirds here at the Allerton Project will be strips of human seed destined for the combine harvester this time next year unless something changes, with the inevitable demise of our birds.
So we are calling for this pause in the scheme to be used as an opportunity to review at how we can tweak the qualifying criteria to ensure the finite money can be distributed more equitably and ensure it is delivering the best environmental outcomes. Attributing blame at this point is not particularly constructive, so let’s learn the lessons, make the changes that are needed and move on. At the end of the day both farmers and nature need certainty, and society wants and needs both.