Link invalid JanetYou can find this information here in the section on standards:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainable-farming-incentive-how-the-scheme-will-work-in-2022
Link invalid JanetYou can find this information here in the section on standards:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sustainable-farming-incentive-how-the-scheme-will-work-in-2022
And who is going to carry out these inspections on every farm, Red Tractor?
Dont know if anyone has asked this but going forward is it going to be based on entitlements ? half of what i farm , the sfp is claimed by owners under their entitlements , now some of those owners arnt working farmers so presume they will take the golden handshake , what happens to the land they farm regard SFI assuming i still farm it ?
Sorry about that - did a typo, have edited, it should work nowLink invalid Janet
That has economic implications. Entitlements are still being traded currently. From what you’ve posted they will cease to have any value from 2024 which must impact their trading value from today…..In early rollout, SFI is indirectly linked to entitlements because we’re basing eligibility on being eligible for BPS (which requires a farmer to have at least 5 hectares and 5 or more entitlements).
In later years, when we’re ready to take on new customers not already registered for BPS, we will remove the BPS eligibility requirement, so a wider range of farmers will become eligible for SFI. Among other things this means the indirect link to entitlements will cease to exist for SFI. We do not expect to do this before 2024.
We’ll explain this in guidance we’ll issue in the new year. We don’t intend to be overly prescriptive – to some extent it will depend on what you’ve found out from your soil organic matter testing.Doesn't say how much organic matter? One wheel barrow load per acre?
I don't think I had a reply to this @Janet Hughes Defra.@Janet Hughes Defra, Im considering an area of agroforestry. Is this going to be in later ambitions and if I start now will I be worse off than waiting for the rules to be published? Also, how prescriptive will it be with regard to tree spacing, avenue width and choice of species please?
It's almost as if hundreds of years of mixed farming as practised by, well, everyone, might've been the right way to farm after all. But then we've all those experts to thank for taking us down a different road these recent few decades. And yet we're still in the hands of experts who are NOW saying we need to look after our soils. Welcome to the modern world where hundreds of years of human knowledge gets binned then has to be fished out again once we've chucked a load of stinking fish on top of it.And really livestock are essential to our operation and without them our OM levels would undoubtedly be lower unless we took land out of production for “regeneration.”
Constant negativity from many sources over livestock has I hope temporarily put my brother off keeping them. And that’s a real loss and shame in my view. That’s the effect of policy on the ground so it needs thinking about carefully.
I’ll leave it at that.
The Rural Payments Agency will deliver the SFI scheme, including monitoring arrangements. There are no plans at all to outsource any of that to private companies.Morning Janet, could you please confirm that it will be written in the terms & conditions of any ELMS agreement that for the full term of any agreement DEFRA will alone police & monitor the scheme, you would understand that it would put a slightly different complexion on the scheme if we were to discover half way through that the government had transferred policing of the agreement to a commercial company.
To clarify, the aim is to collect a good spread of samples – so you get a good indication of levels of soil organic matter across the land you’ve entered into the scheme.Hi Janet,
there was some difference over the weekend in how people interpreted your 'per hectare not per parcel' sampling requirement. Can you confirm if that means one sample for each hectare entered in the scheme, or one sample for each 5ha (for example) block, etc?
Some fields/land parcels in the Eastern Counties might be 40ha or more, whereas in more pastoral areas they could be less than 0.5ha.
To clarify, the aim is to collect a good spread of samples – so you get a good indication of levels of soil organic matter across the land you’ve entered into the scheme.
When I said the samples would be ‘per hectare, not per field’, I did not mean to imply that we’d require ‘one sample per hectare’. We’re trying to move away from this kind of prescriptive approach.
I was saying that the number of samples would depend on the size of the area of land being sampled. In other words, on a small field you’d need fewer samples, and on a large field you’d need more samples.
We’ll explain more about how to do this in guidance we’ll issue next year.
Probably £40/ haDoes anyone forsee the cost of soil organic matter sampling going up ?
Apparently you can do it yourself - just need the methodolygy and an understanding other half, is this not correct ? @Janet Hughes DefraProbably £40/ ha
It's almost as if hundreds of years of mixed farming as practised by, well, everyone, might've been the right way to farm after all. But then we've all those experts to thank for taking us down a different road these recent few decades. And yet we're still in the hands of experts who are NOW saying we need to look after our soils. Welcome to the modern world where hundreds of years of human knowledge gets binned then has to be fished out again once we've chucked a load of stinking fish on top of it.
That is problem with a lot of this stuff.I am afraid that this prescription is one that requires possible variable interpretations by an Inspector. No thanks..
i am sure we could have come up with some rules, now we can now set rules any rules we like now we are outside of the EU, to stop fake split ups. The old system and it’s rules had to please 27 counties now we only have to make it work for the UK.Part of the reason a cap on payments was not enacted was the likelihood of individual businesses being split to maximise payments. History suggested some farmers would be duplictious and reorganise their business structure to maximise payment. So you may grumble but sometimes farmers are own worst enemie.
to an extent we have seen it anyway wi rise of contract farming.
A lot depends on the soil type.That's a really fundamental point.
The evidence is growing just how damaging intense cultivation, as required for root crop and veg establishment, can be to soil biology. However, as you rightly say, the country needs a supply of these foods so they have to be grown somewhere. The best we can do is to try to minimise the impact of what we do.
I can recall fields looking like the Somme after we harvested sugar beet and getting forage maize off caused horrific damage some years.
Some folk are successfully direct drilling forage maize into retained ground cover but beet and veg crops just wouldn't compete.
Maybe growing them only as a single year in a long rotation is the best we can do? They are never going to fit into an SFI soils standard imho though.
DEFRA have made it clear that food supply security has nothing to do with ELMS. That could be its downfall in the end as it forces a choice between farming for the environment or for food production.
So experts didn't come up with pesticides then? Or thusly encouraging the widespread adoption of continuous moncropping?Mixed farming and sensible, diverse rotations have always been the most sustainable way to farm. Nothing’s changed about that.
It wasn’t ‘experts’ that led to the widespread specialisation we see today, but economics, and (I would suggest mostly) a lack of willingness to do the physical work involved.
So experts didn't come up with pesticides then? Or thusly encouraging the widespread adoption of continuous moncropping?
Well, currently we have "experts" advising everyone to give up meat because their expertise is lacking. Maybe I should've phrased it experts who are unfamiliar with thinking things through, or not being able to see the wood for the trees.