Fury as Defra closes key nature-friendly farming scheme to new applicants

The Government is facing an angry backlash over the abrupt closure of its flagship nature-friendly farming payments scheme for new applicants this year.

The Environment Department (Defra) announced late on Tuesday that the sustainable farming incentive SFI, which pays farmers in England for “public goods” such as insecticide-free farming, wildflower strips and managing ponds and hedgerows, was fully allocated for this year.

As a result, the Government has stopped accepting new applications for the incentive – the largest part of the new environmental land management (Elms) programme which has replaced EU-era farming subsidies –  with immediate effect.

Defra said 50,000 farm businesses and more than half of all farmed land was now in environmental land management schemes, which have an overall budget of £5 billion over two years.

But farmers have reacted with fury to what they described as another “shattering blow” to the sector.

It risks further souring the already strained relationship between the farming sector and the Government over the changes to inheritance tax for farm businesses and a speeded-up end to the old system of payments, which were mostly on the basis of the amount of land farmed.

“More farmers are now in schemes and more money is being spent through them than ever before. That is true today and will remain true tomorrow. ”

But National Farmers’ Union president Tom Bradshaw said: “This is another shattering blow to English farms, delivered yet again with no warning, no understanding of the industry and a complete lack of compassion or care.”

“The awful dilemma now faced by many farmers is whether to turn their backs on environmental work and just farm as hard as they can to survive.

“This is a loss to both farming and the environment and cannot be what was intended,” he said.

Country Land and Business Association president Victoria Vyvyan described it as the “most cruel” of the “betrayals” so far.

“It actively harms nature.  It actively harms the environment.

“And, with war once again raging in Europe, to actively harm our food production is reckless beyond belief,” she said.

And Martin Lines, chief executive of the Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), said that while it was good news so many farmers had joined agri-environmental schemes, many more had been prevented from doing so due to overly-complicated schemes and slow processing of applications.

The new SFI offer would not be available until spring 2026, leaving most farmers facing an 18-month gap before fresh payments “which is going to leave some of them in a really difficult financial position”, he warned.

“This has left many farmers feeling frustrated and let down, with no clear opportunity to be rewarded for delivering public goods in the near future,” he said.

For many farmers, this latest move by the Government will only add to the uncertainty and insecurity of their livelihoods

The chair of the Enivronment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Alistair Carmichael, described the move as “another very regrettable decision”  by Defra, which came with immediate effect and no prior warning.

“Farmers are already under immense pressure from a perfect storm of adverse conditions.

“For many farmers, this latest move by the Government will only add to the uncertainty and insecurity of their livelihoods and threaten their financial viability.

“At a time when the Government has deeply fractured its relationship with farmers, this decision on SFI only compounds the impression that the Government either does not have a grasp of the realities that farmers face or is sanguine with the possibility of farms up and down the country going out of business, their land being sold off to other entities and British farmland being lost to farming altogether,” he said.