Jeremy's Blog 16th February 2024: SFI Complement or Alternative
This article by Jeremy Moody first appeared in the CAAV e-Briefing of 15th February 2024
DEFRA’s Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is the element of England’s new regime that sits best with commercial farming. There are some non-production options but, generally, the actions offered can readily fit with or alongside commercial farming. Actions available or becoming available include improving soils, helping the adoption of precision farming and multi-species pastures with their benefits for resistance. Integrated pest management can help prepare for a future where there could be fewer crop protection products.
They have been developed and adapted with their pricing revised because DEFRA wants to achieve the outcomes they are designed to provide – stating an aim that 70 per cent of farmers enter its environmental land management schemes. The start was inevitably deliberately tentative (with the SFI Pilot), then cautious (SFI 2022 with its standards and levels), then more exploratory (SFI 2023 with its move to a larger “pick and mix” menu of options) and now the more fully fledged SFI announced at Oxford to be unfolded over 2024.
That evolution has run well ahead of policy development elsewhere in the United Kingdom and now has more money available with the increasingly deep cuts in Basic Payment. In 2022 and 2023, the larger effect of the policy direction was a high take up of the more familiar Countryside Stewardship but SFI take up is now growing apace.
The early months of this year have seen gossip shift from doubting SFI to concern that it is proving so attractive that it is excluding food production, leading to talk of whether it should be capped in some way. Both seem over-dramatic.
The recent development of SFI has coincided with the sustained wet weather we have had since early October. Many parts of the country having rainfall well ahead of average, month after month. Surface water stands on saturated soils, periodically joined by river flooding and the winterbournes are flowing in chalk country. For many arable farmers, this has laid waste to autumn establishment. Some have lost potatoes and other crops. Land has become unworkable. More widely, working with wet weather, mud and winter’s darkness sours farming’s mood.
There will have been damage at a deeper level with the effects on soil structures and nutrient loss, already depleted as high fertiliser prices reduced applications. Especially on marginal land, seeking the remedial help now offered by SFI to land and finances seems an entirely pragmatic reaction to the season, rather than a retreat from or decommissioning of arable farming.
As and when the weather turns, actions appropriately chosen now could prepare the way for first wheats. That suggests advice might balance options that pay well – winter bird food – with those preserving more flexibility (even shooting against cropping) as reflected in the pricing.
This might suggest that there may be new questions for scheme design. Replacing the comfort blanket of area payments, the new schemes are intended to buy outcomes, with design and pricing adjusted to further that. Judging that on the different spectrum from being a fallback for farming to becoming an alternative takes us back to the questions seen when 100 per cent set-aside was briefly available. Does this aid productivity improvement or, yet again, avoid it? Is DEFRA now achieving what it intended or is the perversity of circumstances giving a slightly different result?
As it may be early enough to ask but too early to tell, the reality, perhaps with less take up of non-production options than rumoured, seems likely to be less dramatic as farmers make the schemes work to find their way through a difficult season.