Changes to Sustainable Farming Incentives, January 2024
At the Oxford Farming Conference in early January 2024, Environment Secretary Steve Barclay announced updates to the government's Sustainable Farming Incentives (SFI). Below is my summary of what they mean in practice for organic and low-input farmers in England.
Headline changes to SFI
- There has been an increase in most SFI payment rates which will be applied to all existing agreements, but the disparity between organic option OP4 and the SFI SAM3 payment remains.
- There have been some increases to Countryside Stewardship (CS) equivalent rates, but not all at the headline-grabbing 10% rate.
- There have been some grassland options announced, specifically species rich payments, which are described as an updated CS option. Whether this is available to anyone with species rich pasture and not in specific habitat areas is a question we are looking into.
What does this mean in practice?
Bear with me as I’m simplifying this to try and make it clear …
Sustainable Farming Incentives replaces Countryside Stewardship
CS has been replaced by a hybrid scheme of SFI options – old CS options and updated CS options which can be combined to create either a single scheme or a series of schemes. Some options are 3 or 5 years and so allow alignment of options and linking into existing CS schemes.
If you have an existing CS scheme you can add SFI and the new CS options on top in fields without existing options. If you are due to renew CS this year, you will be able design a whole new agreement using all of the options from SFI, new and old CS options into one single agreement, starting Summer 2024.
If you have not already, you should consider applying for SFI options now, with a view to add new CS and SFI options at the annual review. This would be better than waiting another 8 months to apply, if cashflow is an important part of the decision-making process.
No more Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) schemes
The HLS scheme has been retired, although existing agreements continue and will be replaced by targeted CS options in conjunction with SFI and less specific CS options. There is a danger of over-complication but also over-simplification and it is definitely now a case of looking at getting paid for what you already do and how you can use this funding to effect business change.
Layering your options
It is currently still the case that existing agreements need to run their course, but new options can be layered on top, although it would seem possible that this arrangement will allow farms to change CS options or be more flexible, but we need to see full details.
There are a good range of options and we do not have all the guidance details yet but as the new options are not open until the summer, we will have time to see guidance documents.
New options of interest for organic and low-input farms
There are too many options to talk about them all here, but the areas of support are broad. All existing SFI options continue along with all existing CS options, some of which have been updated. There are, however, some new options, and the main important ones are worth taking note of.
Grassland options: updated species rich grassland CS options (up to £646/ha). These are very useful options for grassland farmers, but we are waiting for more details. There were very defined rules for eligibility for the CS options and we need to find out how much the updated CS will change that.
Manage species rich floodplain meadows (£1070/ha) and a manage scrapes and gutters supplement (£1.17/m2).
Arable options:
- no-till (£73/ha)
- multi-species spring/summer/Autumn cover crop (£153-163/ha)
- variable rate technology (£27/ha)
- camera or remote sensing or robotic weeding (££43-150/ha)
Species recovery and management: mink (£99/ha), edible dormouse (£40/ha) in addition to existing deer and grey squirrel CS options; rhododendron control (£264/ha)
Lowland peat: raise water levels on cropped peat soils (£892-1409/ha) or on grassland (£840-1381)
Woodland: supplements to woodland improvement CS WD2 option of up to £275/ha including ride management and improving woodland resilience and fire belts
Agroforestry: variable rates depending on plant density – up to (£849/ha)
Boundaries: dry stone walling and earth bank maintenance payments (up to £27/100m)
Waterbodies:
- manage grassland for flood and drought resilience (£1241/ha for arable, £938 for grassland)
- connect river and floodplain habitats (£1242/ha)
- manage riparian and water edge habitat s (£1186/ha)
- pond management (up to £257 per pond) and additional payments for ponds bigger than 2ha
- ditch management (£4 per100m both sides)
Moorland: low grazing densities on moorland (£20-66/ha) plus cattle and pony supplements (£7-23/ha)
Coastal Saltmarsh: maintain coastal saltmarsh (£483/ha)
Access: As well as a welcome return of educational access payments (£363/visit) there are new options:
- open access payments of £92/ha
- footpath, bridleway or cycle path access payments for new routes of £77-158/100m)
- access for people with reduced mobility payments of £221/100m.
Flexibility allows for more bespoke payments
In conclusion, the flexible nature of these new options does allow agreements to be much more targeted to the farm and is less one size fits all. Getting paid for what you currently do or use the options to change business direction remain the best strategy. There is the potential for over-complication with 3- or 5-year options and the issue of rotational options from CS remains, but hopefully we are getting around these issues.
Find out more
Future Farm Resilience – workshops, webinars, walks and more
We are running more webinars and in person meetings this spring, to talk through these and subsequent changes. We'll also continue with more specific targeted meetings specifically looking at the hedge and woodland options, livestock options including grants and also a more detailed look at arable options particularly looking at the cover crop options and a session for vegetable and smaller scale producers.
See our Events page for details.
Contact us
If you have questions feel free to contact us at FFR@soilassociation.org
If you haven’t yet done so, please ask for a one-to-one call.
If you’ve already had a conversation with or visit from one of our farming team, you are still welcome to get back in contact to clarify things.
Useful resources
Help navigating new payments as they unfold, plus links to relevant Defra pages, environmental calculators and mental health signposting and more.
