Sustainable farming incentive - handbook for 2023 has been published

Afternoon all,

Today we've published a handbook containing all the detailed information about the sustainable farming incentive offer for this year.

The handbook is here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sfi-handbook-for-the-sfi-2023-offer

An overview blogpost is here: https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/2023/06/21/sfi-more-ways-to-enhance-your-income-productivity-and-the-environment/

The handbook sets out all the detailed actions, rules and requirements of the scheme, in a single handbook that you can download and print (because this is what many of you have asked us to do, rather than spreading the information across multiple pages on GOV.UK).

We have made some changes to the scheme in response to feedback from you and other farmers and through our pilot and early rollout of the scheme. In particular, we have made a much broader range of options available, made the scheme more flexible so you can pick the individual actions you want to do rather than having to do them in set combinations or percentages of land entered into the scheme.

Finally, I know I have not been present on the forum in the consistent, ongoing way many of you would like. I understand why that has been frustrating and annoying, and I am really sorry about that. I have found that am just not able to personally engage on every thread on an ongoing basis, I'm afraid. However I do really want to find a way of addressing your questions and hearing your feedback all the time, not just when we publish new information, so I am working with @Clive to put in place a better, ongoing, sustainable way of managing this so that you can ask questions of me and my team and give us feedback when they arise. We will let you know where we get to with that as soon as possible.

For this particular thread, I am planning to be online at least daily, for the next week, to answer your questions about the information we've published today. I have posted this as a question with voting, and if you could upvote questions that you particularly want me to address it would be helpful if you could vote for them so that I can prioritise my time and attention, and I will then do my best to work through as many of them as I possibly can. I hope this is helpful and look forward to your questions.

If you have questions about your specific farm situation, the best thing to do is contact the RPA contact centre and they will be able to point you in the right direction.

Thank you.
 
Solution
Honestly this is where you get farmers feedback and where you should have laid out questions before any bps was removed , it seems the cart was sent out before the horse was even born you now have the whole budget and are asking us if we want to participate with tearms that are ludicrous to any business owner for little in return but a few quid and a "your doing your bit for the environment"? the forms are so complex that it might as well be written in binary code.

Sid

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
South Molton
@Janet Hughes Defra do you realise that by not allowing half management of hedgerows you will end up with lots of boundary hedges that don't get managed as neither owner can enter them in the scheme?
You can enter single sides.

Quick hands up from 15 pages and 24 hrs anyone signing up yet ??
Can't until August

I don't mind committing multi years (with some area flexibility to fit uneven field sizes) I just dislike to current complexity of have both CSS and SFi options - its would be loads easier to just do it all under SFI
Just cancel your CSS agreement.

I can't really see why SFI is 3 year agreement. Popular FBT period is 5 years, so it doesn't fit. Lots of land on annual let's.

Can't SFI quite simply be on annual basis?
100% agree, make it a multi optional agreement , longer you commit the more you deliver the more you get. Like a loyalty scheme.
Year 1 £50/ha
Year 2 £60/ha
Year 3 £70/ha
Year 4 £70/ha
Year 5 £70/ha and so forth
 

Hindsight

Member
Location
Lincolnshire
I can't really see why SFI is 3 year agreement. Popular FBT period is 5 years, so it doesn't fit. Lots of land on annual let's.

Can't SFI quite simply be on annual basis?

The 2/3 year lege fallow could be single year, which would be better for environment imho (less nitrogen fertiliser used).

Late summer cover crop, sprayed off 15th May would also be a good option if it existed. Could be N fixing, OM addition and sustainable grassweed control.
SFI is three years as Defra research showed 3 years as most common length of FBT!!! That was what I was told.
 
Hi Janet,

Regarding SAM1: Soil Management Plan & Soil Organic Matter

The payment for this is £5.80/ha and an organic matter soil sample currently costs about £25/sample.

So farmers will be losing money if they apply for this action on any fields less than 5 ha. That rules out a lot of parcels.

Nonetheless, this action will lead to huge demand for soil sampling and there is no chance that the laboratories will be able to keep up.

We'll sign up, the labs will dramatically increase their prices and then farmers (even those that did their maths) will get caught out and lose money on this action.

You also have to ask what the point of it is on organic / permanent grassland as farmers often can't manage these fields differently anyway?

Presumably it's just a data harvesting exercise by government.
You can combine smaller parcels into a single sampling area to avoid that situation, if they're similar (see page 22 of the handbook)
 
What you are paying for IPM / NMR and soil organic matter does not cover the costs of either the tests and or the farmers time in doing them/ sorting out a report etc.

If you are really serious then you need to revise this £2 an acre for organic matter payment urgently!

Grassland Farms are losing about £90 acre BPS, under the new scheme they will be lucky to have £20 acre left after all the costs of doing what you want!

With such a big hole in their budgets/ cashflow farms will not be able to join the SFI even if they wanted to!

And where is the other £50/60 acre going when its removed from farmers payments?

Also you mention CS as a way to make up payments, can you confirm that this is the last year or not @Janet Hughes Defra that you can apply for CS and after that the scheme is closed?

If the CS deadline is 18th August this year? then perhaps you should urgently consider moving it to say 1 Oct 23 as this time of year is a very busy time for farmers on field work and it would give farmers more time to compare options on the SFI and CS scheme and what is best for them to do!

No it's not the last year of CS, we are going to continue with the scheme and will be adding more options next year, as set out in this document in January (https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...ed-environment-and-climate-goods-and-services)
 
Visiting more individual farms I expect.
.can't be bad out of office 2 or 3 days a week?
I've been in meetings all day, I am working through outstanding questions now (I said in my initial post I would be here daily to answer questions, which is what I'm doing - I'm not able to be here all day every day unfortunately)
 
Janet will say that you can stack SFI and CSS on a farm but this is dishonest as it's almost never possible to do both on the same parcel.
There are some options you combine on the same bits of land, many more that you can combine on different areas within the same parcel (ie next to each other, eg a margin and an in-field option), this is set out in the handbook and will be shown in the application service when you log in to apply
 

Huno

Member
Arable Farmer
There are some options you combine on the same bits of land, many more that you can combine on different areas within the same parcel (ie next to each other, eg a margin and an in-field option), this is set out in the handbook and will be shown in the application service when you log in to apply
It just doesn't add up for a commercial farming business and i have said that from Day 1...😊
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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