SFI Pilot payments

[delilah]

I hope that's helpful,

Not really. Because you are studiously ignoring the crux of the matter.

You need to show us an SFI standard that the sub-200 acre one-person-band will fall over themselves to apply for. Until then, it's just words.

 

[BrianV]

We're not asking you to choose between food production (or a profitable business) and the environment; we're saying that these 2 things need to go hand in hand as they already do on many farms. The new schemes are about overwhelmingly about paying farmers for the environmental goods they produce for the public alongside food, not choosing one or the other.

For some farms that will be about adopting or continuing more sustainable approaches to farming, eg by taking care of soil health, using integrated pest management, managing nutrients in a more sustainable way (if you're already doing these things, which many are, you can get paid for it to recognise the value of those practices to the natural environment). We'll pay for those things through SFI so you can generate an additional income alongside your income from food production whilst doing actions that should, over the long term, also help your farm remain resilient, profitable and productive.

For others, it will be about for example, adding winter bird food into your rotation, protecting watercourses or sparing less productive areas that are less profitable / hard to farm / have any number of other problems. Many farmers already do these sorts of actions through Countryside Stewardship. That will be open for applications this year and next, and then its successor scheme Local Nature Recovery will take its place from 2025 onwards. That scheme will be open to individual farmers, as CS is now.

You will be able to do whatever combination of things works for your farm business, alongside food production. We're making the schemes flexible, fair (no more unfair inspections and penalties) and accessible (no more huge amounts of paperwork or bureaucracy; rules that allow tenant farmers to participate and flex their agreements over time). We will flex the budget to respond to farmer demand, so that if more of you want to go into SFI we'll fund that, if more want to do CS and then LNR we'll fund that instead.

So to answer your questions:
1, It's not my role to set or comment on the overall direction (though I'm happy to explain it) - that's the role of elected government, I'm here to advise them and implement their policies and I'm not allowed to get into political debate. If the question is can it work / is it workable, then yes I think it can work and that's what I and my team are working (with many farmers) to make happen.
2, It's not the case that zero emphasis has been put on securing food production - many of the actions we are paying for support both food production and the environment, and as is the case for many farms already it is possible and desirable for food production and environmental production to go hand in hand. There are also other measures being put in place to help support food production including work on supply chain fairness, making regulations around use of slurry and manures more workable for farmers, running an industry fertiliser working group that is advising and supporting policy development on fertilisers specifically, and bringing forward this year's BPS payments in line with our new approach to making payments more frequently (SFI payments will be quarterly), recognising that's better for farmer cashflow
3, and 4, no we don't expect food self sufficiency to decrease as a result of ELMs - any land taken out of production is likely to be less productive (as many farms do now, in CS), otherwise farmers would be unlikely to decide to do it (and this is all about farmers deciding what to do on your land). We are also, as you say, supporting productivity improvements on the remaining land through support for productivity grants, innovation research and development, learning and skills and free business planning advice for farmers. You might not find those attractive yourself, but we do generally get a lot of interest in these schemes, and we're trying to provide a range of options to suit all farmers, knowing how diverse the sector is.

I hope that's helpful,

Janet

Sorry Janet but you seem to have swallowed the environmental guff hook line & sinker, you can't take out large areas of farm land or reduce output in schemes of 500 to 5000 Hectares & then try to pretend it will have no effect on their output.
If farmers are expected to farm in the future without BPS payments isn't the fact that you are saying bringing forward 50% of this years BPS is a help a stark admission that you have got it all wrong!
You say you are there to "advise" government, if that's the case either they are not listening or you are giving them the wrong advice!

 

[Ceri]

Sorry Janet but you seem to have swallowed the environmental guff hook line & sinker, you can't take out large areas of farm land or reduce output in schemes of 500 to 5000 Hectares & then try to pretend it will have no effect on their output.
If farmers are expected to farm in the future without BPS payments isn't the fact that you are saying bringing forward 50% of this years BPS is a help a stark admission that you have got it all wrong!
You say you are there to "advice" government, if that's the case either they are not listening or you are giving them the wrong advice!

It's obvious they're not going to listen reading Janet's reply and things are just going to have to unfold I'm afraid.

Batton down the hatches for now guys & gells there will be light at the end of the tunnel I'm sure of that but could be a bit sticky before we get there.

 

[gone up the hill]

We're not asking you to choose between food production (or a profitable business) and the environment; we're saying that these 2 things need to go hand in hand as they already do on many farms. The new schemes are about overwhelmingly about paying farmers for the environmental goods they produce for the public alongside food, not choosing one or the other.

For some farms that will be about adopting or continuing more sustainable approaches to farming, eg by taking care of soil health, using integrated pest management, managing nutrients in a more sustainable way (if you're already doing these things, which many are, you can get paid for it to recognise the value of those practices to the natural environment). We'll pay for those things through SFI so you can generate an additional income alongside your income from food production whilst doing actions that should, over the long term, also help your farm remain resilient, profitable and productive.

For others, it will be about for example, adding winter bird food into your rotation, protecting watercourses or sparing less productive areas that are less profitable / hard to farm / have any number of other problems. Many farmers already do these sorts of actions through Countryside Stewardship. That will be open for applications this year and next, and then its successor scheme Local Nature Recovery will take its place from 2025 onwards. That scheme will be open to individual farmers, as CS is now.

You will be able to do whatever combination of things works for your farm business, alongside food production. We're making the schemes flexible, fair (no more unfair inspections and penalties) and accessible (no more huge amounts of paperwork or bureaucracy; rules that allow tenant farmers to participate and flex their agreements over time). We will flex the budget to respond to farmer demand, so that if more of you want to go into SFI we'll fund that, if more want to do CS and then LNR we'll fund that instead.

So to answer your questions:
1, It's not my role to set or comment on the overall direction (though I'm happy to explain it) - that's the role of elected government, I'm here to advise them and implement their policies and I'm not allowed to get into political debate. If the question is can it work / is it workable, then yes I think it can work and that's what I and my team are working (with many farmers) to make happen.
2, It's not the case that zero emphasis has been put on securing food production - many of the actions we are paying for support both food production and the environment, and as is the case for many farms already it is possible and desirable for food production and environmental production to go hand in hand. There are also other measures being put in place to help support food production including work on supply chain fairness, making regulations around use of slurry and manures more workable for farmers, running an industry fertiliser working group that is advising and supporting policy development on fertilisers specifically, and bringing forward this year's BPS payments in line with our new approach to making payments more frequently (SFI payments will be quarterly), recognising that's better for farmer cashflow
3, and 4, no we don't expect food self sufficiency to decrease as a result of ELMs - any land taken out of production is likely to be less productive (as many farms do now, in CS), otherwise farmers would be unlikely to decide to do it (and this is all about farmers deciding what to do on your land). We are also, as you say, supporting productivity improvements on the remaining land through support for productivity grants, innovation research and development, learning and skills and free business planning advice for farmers. You might not find those attractive yourself, but we do generally get a lot of interest in these schemes, and we're trying to provide a range of options to suit all farmers, knowing how diverse the sector is.

I hope that's helpful,

Janet

I have never read such rubbish and just shows how much the top people at Defra/ within Gov are totally out of touch with life in the real world!

You are taking away 2 billion of direct payments from the farming industry which is mostly hard working small/ medium size family farms that need that cash to survive and instead giving it to charity's like the RSPB/NT or very large and rich landowners like the Goldsmiths and none of these need this money!

The gov can find 10 billion of so quid yesterday out of thin air to reduce very slightly heating/elec bills for houses with no red tape etc attached to these payments yet cannot give hardworking family farmers that are the backbone of both food production and rural areas in the UK 2 billion a year to ensure the UK has a secure and staple supply of affordable food!

Everyone i have spoken to about the SFI/ Elms payments/ rules have all said be that land agents/ farmers etc that its a complete load of BS/ payments are worthless and no one is going to bother with it and every land agent i have spoken to have all said the same: Not ONE of them will suggest to their clients to apply/join these schemes as things stand!

And yet you @Janet Hughes Defra and your team are refusing to accept this and thus there is an almighty car crash coming down the road very very quickly that never you Janet or the people above you will be able to stop/control and the result will be the biggest U turn in UK AG the UK has seen overnight since WW11 .

 

[Dave645]

We're not asking you to choose between food production (or a profitable business) and the environment; we're saying that these 2 things need to go hand in hand as they already do on many farms. The new schemes are about overwhelmingly about paying farmers for the environmental goods they produce for the public alongside food, not choosing one or the other.

For some farms that will be about adopting or continuing more sustainable approaches to farming, eg by taking care of soil health, using integrated pest management, managing nutrients in a more sustainable way (if you're already doing these things, which many are, you can get paid for it to recognise the value of those practices to the natural environment). We'll pay for those things through SFI so you can generate an additional income alongside your income from food production whilst doing actions that should, over the long term, also help your farm remain resilient, profitable and productive.

For others, it will be about for example, adding winter bird food into your rotation, protecting watercourses or sparing less productive areas that are less profitable / hard to farm / have any number of other problems. Many farmers already do these sorts of actions through Countryside Stewardship. That will be open for applications this year and next, and then its successor scheme Local Nature Recovery will take its place from 2025 onwards. That scheme will be open to individual farmers, as CS is now.

You will be able to do whatever combination of things works for your farm business, alongside food production. We're making the schemes flexible, fair (no more unfair inspections and penalties) and accessible (no more huge amounts of paperwork or bureaucracy; rules that allow tenant farmers to participate and flex their agreements over time). We will flex the budget to respond to farmer demand, so that if more of you want to go into SFI we'll fund that, if more want to do CS and then LNR we'll fund that instead.

So to answer your questions:
1, It's not my role to set or comment on the overall direction (though I'm happy to explain it) - that's the role of elected government, I'm here to advise them and implement their policies and I'm not allowed to get into political debate. If the question is can it work / is it workable, then yes I think it can work and that's what I and my team are working (with many farmers) to make happen.
2, It's not the case that zero emphasis has been put on securing food production - many of the actions we are paying for support both food production and the environment, and as is the case for many farms already it is possible and desirable for food production and environmental production to go hand in hand. There are also other measures being put in place to help support food production including work on supply chain fairness, making regulations around use of slurry and manures more workable for farmers, running an industry fertiliser working group that is advising and supporting policy development on fertilisers specifically, and bringing forward this year's BPS payments in line with our new approach to making payments more frequently (SFI payments will be quarterly), recognising that's better for farmer cashflow
3, and 4, no we don't expect food self sufficiency to decrease as a result of ELMs - any land taken out of production is likely to be less productive (as many farms do now, in CS), otherwise farmers would be unlikely to decide to do it (and this is all about farmers deciding what to do on your land). We are also, as you say, supporting productivity improvements on the remaining land through support for productivity grants, innovation research and development, learning and skills and free business planning advice for farmers. You might not find those attractive yourself, but we do generally get a lot of interest in these schemes, and we're trying to provide a range of options to suit all farmers, knowing how diverse the sector is.

I hope that's helpful,

Janet

That’s an interesting reply and I get it, but while BPS supported farmers when food production was unprofitable, for any number of reasons, poor weather only a few years ago bad weather near harvest crashed crop production, and long years, of long term over production of crops, that sustained food at rock bottom prices, we had BPS to keep farms afloat, and keep voluntary environmental options open and funded.
I don’t see a long term plan that make sense anywhere, BPS was a long term plan to sustain farming in the ups and downs, and I think it did it for a bargain price when you look at farms in the 10-100ha is size bracket and the money they got. For what they did.

I think the basic worry for farmers is the type of support BPS delivered is going, at no point will these new scheme supply an excess of money, like the BPS did, so one bad year in core profitability for crops can break us, and yet the government seems to care not. Not excess to fund voluntary environmental items.

It matters not if I have my farm in your entry level scheme if the basic profitability of the farm goes, for even one year, then that’s it end of the road, because that entry level scheme will barely make what it cost to implement and manage, even if the scheme is flexible, if I put expensive seed on to establish bird food cover crops and they fail in year one your going to want them redone over and over until they are established, even if that cost is far over the income it will bring in. It’s not wrong to want what your paying for, but at some point the farmers costs have to be taken into account. And unless things change alot no basic level or intermediate level scheme is going to bring in any meaningful profit. And high level scheme options seem so far, unrealistic to merge with weather dependant farming

I looked at the out going schemes this year and at the options, the only reason to go into it is if cropping is not profitable, I get it, but what happens if no land is profitable, for any number of reason that have happened in the past?
Your whole scheme as you say is based on working alongside profitable farming, what happens if farming is not profitable.
BPS protected profitability these new schemes don’t.

No amount of grass margins cover crop money hedgerow money, is going to keep the core farm profitable if cropping is not.
Arable farms rely on livestock farms and world market prices, live stock farms rely on markets and supermarkets to stay profitable, we only have to look at pigs eggs and chickens, over the last year, to show what happens when you let the market pay a fair price when the supermarkets are the only buyers. If we see the planned cut in meat consumption world wide then even arable farms are on shaky ground, one farm near me has taken a £500k nitrogen bill so they already gambled on next season, if the war ended and wheat dropped where does that leave them?

Just one bad year and the whole uk farming industry house of cards comes down, with it so does our society as a whole.

I look at the numbers in DEFRAS own numbers on farming incomes and what % is made up from BPS money and, it’s quite scary that they think removing this money can be done.

my gut says that, food prices will double, or farmers on a lot of small farms will go bust.
Neither is a great result.
The reality is farmers don’t get a fair market share of the income from the food they produce and nothing DEFRA is doing will fix that. And nothing in the new scheme is designed to protect the core profitability of farming it’s just wishful thinking.
I do get environmental goals are very important, but I also believe that can only be delivered by a strong profitable farming industry.

I don’t think you can polish these new schemes to the point we cannot see the broken idea behind them.
If a small farm relied on BPS for 50% of there profit year to year on average, no amount of polish will make up for that drop in income, it’s like we are a tree, our branches protect the planet and it’s people, yet DEFRA want to peal off the bark that protects us from pests and problems.
Removing BPS will have far more negative environmental results, than positive, and reduce the core resilience the farming industry had, Scotland and wales can see that.
while I am sure you have zero to do with policy, and even if you agreed even if only in part you can change nothing, we hope your pointing out what farmers think of the the car crash the new system is going to be, to the politicians.

It would be a shame if you did not, even the little boy knew to put his finger in the leak in the dam, even if he ultimately couldn’t stop the flood.

I as always will try to keep an open mind and look at the new updates to the new schemes, but so far they miss by a mile.
A question
What does the maths say if you Total up the area of land that would be in your scheme if you had the first 100 ha of land every uk farmer claims on and how much money that would cost, if payout was at BPS rates?
then adjust the cross compliance rules so the land in that first 100ha of every farm has to hit your goals that you expect to get for that amount of money. What does that look like?
As far as budget, cost to deliver, and target goals, your after?

be honest is that harder to deliver than the current schemes your planning?
Especially if you used points like the old ELS scheme used to work out if the farm was hitting targets.

Sorry that got long fast.

 

[aangus]

I fear Janet isn’t listening and is relating back to her bosses that everything is fine and there will be take up these new schemes

 

[J 1177]

I fear Janet isn’t listening and is relating back to her bosses that everything is fine and there will be take up these new schemes

Well if she is when the shite hits the fan and theres next to zero take up she will have to carry the can.
Can i add that i dont think this is the case and i suspect Janet is as frustrated with these schemes as we are.

 

[DRC]

@Janet Hughes Defra , you talk about animal welfare and yet government do nothing to help reinstate small local abattoirs . My neighbouring pig farmer has 1000s of extra pigs backing up on farm, because of problems in the abattoir and supply chain. There Isn’t / wasn’t anything wrong with the way farms were subsided and the old HLS/ mid tier schemes. The money wasted on reinventing the wheel that you are doing must be criminal .

 

[Vader]

The message will sink in when take up negliable

No it wont as 3/4 will get taken by big estates, rspb, nt, etc.
So gov will say its a sucess.
Princess nut nuts agenda rolls on.

 

[Ceri]

I see Jacob rees mogg is calling for elms to be ditched due to the current economic climate etc, the media are portraying him and others in the party who think the same as the hard right torys who want to stick 2 fingers up to the environment....... Ffs no .... He's talking common sense and its a breath of fresh air.........

 

[holwellcourtfarm]

I'm afraid I've yet to see any initiative that genuinely addresses the dangerously low average UK farm profitability.

The grant schemes announced so far look, to me at least, more like they are aimed at supporting the agricultural supply and advice industries.

I have a sense of foreboding for the structure of UK farming.

 

[aangus]

@Janet Hughes Defra , you talk about animal welfare and yet government do nothing to help reinstate small local abattoirs . My neighbouring pig farmer has 1000s of extra pigs backing up on farm, because of problems in the abattoir and supply chain. There Isn’t / wasn’t anything wrong with the way farms were subsided and the old HLS/ mid tier schemes. The money wasted on reinventing the wheel that you are doing must be criminal .

The trouble with Defra is that no one has actually been at the coal face, so to speak. We need farmers (BFU) from every walk of life to put their ideas forward to Defra/Government. Who is going to sign up for £10 here another few quid there. But that’s what the Government wants doesn’t it no more subsidies.
And we voted for Brexit and this was always on the cards.

 

[Ceri]

No it wont as 3/4 will get taken by big estates, rspb, nt, etc.
So gov will say its a sucess.
Princess nut nuts agenda rolls on.

I wonder what the national trust, rspc are gonna say when they get told - hang on guys your going to have to plant some wheat cause we can't find any anywhere & breads pretty dear at a fiver a loaf, and half the population are flat broke.....

 

[spin cycle]

@Janet Hughes Defra working saturday ....kudos

 

[DRC]

@Janet Hughes Defra working saturday ....kudos

Doubt it

 

[Goweresque]

@Janet Hughes Defra

Is the current inflation rate having any impact on Defra thinking at all, especially on payment rates? Just about every farm input has gone up by significant amounts in the last year, including many of the things that would be required to complete SFI standards (fuel for operations, seed for cover crops or herbal leys, even the cost of soil surveys will be rising due to contractors increased costs). If ELMS is paying farmers for 'environmental goods' are those goods not rising in price with everything else in the economy? The SFI payment rates were announced some time ago before all the current economic disruption - at the rate things are going £20-40/ha is going to be a rounding error in farm costings.

 

[Wombat]

I'm afraid I've yet to see any initiative that genuinely addresses the dangerously low average UK farm profitability.

The grant schemes announced so far look, to me at least, more like they are aimed at supporting the agricultural supply and advice industries.

I have a sense of foreboding for the structure of UK farming.

Grant schemes have always been and will always be total rubbish. Would rather have a tax rebate than the grant waste of times

 

[spin cycle]

Doubt it

believe it...she 'likyed' my post at 08:25 this morning

 

[topground]

We're not asking you to choose between food production (or a profitable business) and the environment; we're saying that these 2 things need to go hand in hand as they already do on many farms. The new schemes are about overwhelmingly about paying farmers for the environmental goods they produce for the public alongside food, not choosing one or the other.

For some farms that will be about adopting or continuing more sustainable approaches to farming, eg by taking care of soil health, using integrated pest management, managing nutrients in a more sustainable way (if you're already doing these things, which many are, you can get paid for it to recognise the value of those practices to the natural environment). We'll pay for those things through SFI so you can generate an additional income alongside your income from food production whilst doing actions that should, over the long term, also help your farm remain resilient, profitable and productive.

For others, it will be about for example, adding winter bird food into your rotation, protecting watercourses or sparing less productive areas that are less profitable / hard to farm / have any number of other problems. Many farmers already do these sorts of actions through Countryside Stewardship. That will be open for applications this year and next, and then its successor scheme Local Nature Recovery will take its place from 2025 onwards. That scheme will be open to individual farmers, as CS is now.

You will be able to do whatever combination of things works for your farm business, alongside food production. We're making the schemes flexible, fair (no more unfair inspections and penalties) and accessible (no more huge amounts of paperwork or bureaucracy; rules that allow tenant farmers to participate and flex their agreements over time). We will flex the budget to respond to farmer demand, so that if more of you want to go into SFI we'll fund that, if more want to do CS and then LNR we'll fund that instead.

So to answer your questions:
1, It's not my role to set or comment on the overall direction (though I'm happy to explain it) - that's the role of elected government, I'm here to advise them and implement their policies and I'm not allowed to get into political debate. If the question is can it work / is it workable, then yes I think it can work and that's what I and my team are working (with many farmers) to make happen.
2, It's not the case that zero emphasis has been put on securing food production - many of the actions we are paying for support both food production and the environment, and as is the case for many farms already it is possible and desirable for food production and environmental production to go hand in hand. There are also other measures being put in place to help support food production including work on supply chain fairness, making regulations around use of slurry and manures more workable for farmers, running an industry fertiliser working group that is advising and supporting policy development on fertilisers specifically, and bringing forward this year's BPS payments in line with our new approach to making payments more frequently (SFI payments will be quarterly), recognising that's better for farmer cashflow
3, and 4, no we don't expect food self sufficiency to decrease as a result of ELMs - any land taken out of production is likely to be less productive (as many farms do now, in CS), otherwise farmers would be unlikely to decide to do it (and this is all about farmers deciding what to do on your land). We are also, as you say, supporting productivity improvements on the remaining land through support for productivity grants, innovation research and development, learning and skills and free business planning advice for farmers. You might not find those attractive yourself, but we do generally get a lot of interest in these schemes, and we're trying to provide a range of options to suit all farmers, knowing how diverse the sector is.

I hope that's helpful,

Janet

Contrary to the first paragraph the grassland standards as set out in the pilot would directly affect my profitability.
How? Because I would have to spend time and money on soil sampling which I only carry out when I consider the ground might need lime so limited to simple pH testing anything beyond is an additional cost.
The cattle are outwintered whenever possible so the muck and urine is applied where it falls.and I won’t be importing any organic material.
I don’t apply fertiliser.
I reseed where the cattle have been over winter and they do most of the work in turning over the ground. I rotate those areas but outwintering would appear to fall foul of the bare ground rules despite there being no runoff or soil erosion. To avoid bare ground I would need to house cattle with the additional costs of bedding and spreading manure and the cost of the buildings themselves.
I strip graze and back fence spring calving sucklers which provides maximum opportunities for grass production but I don’t see that fits in with minimum award heights nor can it when the purpose is to graze the grass off and move on daily. I conserve any surplus as it arises.
Waiting to cut for winter forage until a centrally determined date makes to sense in terms of grass quality, growth and the weather.
Delivering on the number of grass species per square metre is an interesting one to monitor and enforce when the grazing system means they don’t get time to go to seed and if the inspector turns up in January how will that part of the requirement be determined?
My system means I have minimal metal wear and I burn as little diesel as possible.
My profitability depends on selling maximum kilos of 12 month old suckled calves off the farm. To comply with the SFI rules as I read them would mean I would have to reduce the numbers cows on the farm and my output while my fixed costs remain the same and therefore my profitability fails significantly.
.
@Janet Hughes Defra I would be grateful if you would run the detail of my simple system past your ‘experts’ and ask them how I can possibly deliver the requirements of the SFI pilot and also the SFI scheme beyond the pilot since I may have missed something.
While I don’t expect an immediate response I would appreciate confirmation that you have asked the question and will provide the experts solutions in due course or perhaps an acknowledgement that SFI doesn’t work at the current levels of compensation for all grass farms.

 

[steveR]

That’s an interesting reply and I get it, but while BPS supported farmers when food production was unprofitable, for any number of reasons, poor weather only a few years ago bad weather near harvest crashed crop production, and long years, of long term over production of crops, that sustained food at rock bottom prices, we had BPS to keep farms afloat, and keep voluntary environmental options open and funded.
I don’t see a long term plan that make sense anywhere, BPS was a long term plan to sustain farming in the ups and downs, and I think it did it for a bargain price when you look at farms in the 10-100ha is size bracket and the money they got. For what they did.

I think the basic worry for farmers is the type of support BPS delivered is going, at no point will these new scheme supply an excess of money, like the BPS did, so one bad year in core profitability for crops can break us, and yet the government seems to care not. Not excess to fund voluntary environmental items.

It matters not if I have my farm in your entry level scheme if the basic profitability of the farm goes, for even one year, then that’s it end of the road, because that entry level scheme will barely make what it cost to implement and manage, even if the scheme is flexible, if I put expensive seed on to establish bird food cover crops and they fail in year one your going to want them redone over and over until they are established, even if that cost is far over the income it will bring in. It’s not wrong to want what your paying for, but at some point the farmers costs have to be taken into account. And unless things change alot no basic level or intermediate level scheme is going to bring in any meaningful profit. And high level scheme options seem so far, unrealistic to merge with weather dependant farming

I looked at the out going schemes this year and at the options, the only reason to go into it is if cropping is not profitable, I get it, but what happens if no land is profitable, for any number of reason that have happened in the past?
Your whole scheme as you say is based on working alongside profitable farming, what happens if farming is not profitable.
BPS protected profitability these new schemes don’t.

No amount of grass margins cover crop money hedgerow money, is going to keep the core farm profitable if cropping is not.
Arable farms rely on livestock farms and world market prices, live stock farms rely on markets and supermarkets to stay profitable, we only have to look at pigs eggs and chickens, over the last year, to show what happens when you let the market pay a fair price when the supermarkets are the only buyers. If we see the planned cut in meat consumption world wide then even arable farms are on shaky ground, one farm near me has taken a £500k nitrogen bill so they already gambled on next season, if the war ended and wheat dropped where does that leave them?

Just one bad year and the whole uk farming industry house of cards comes down, with it so does our society as a whole.

I look at the numbers in DEFRAS own numbers on farming incomes and what % is made up from BPS money and, it’s quite scary that they think removing this money can be done.

my gut says that, food prices will double, or farmers on a lot of small farms will go bust.
Neither is a great result.
The reality is farmers don’t get a fair market share of the income from the food they produce and nothing DEFRA is doing will fix that. And nothing in the new scheme is designed to protect the core profitability of farming it’s just wishful thinking.
I do get environmental goals are very important, but I also believe that can only be delivered by a strong profitable farming industry.

I don’t think you can polish these new schemes to the point we cannot see the broken idea behind them.
If a small farm relied on BPS for 50% of there profit year to year on average, no amount of polish will make up for that drop in income, it’s like we are a tree, our branches protect the planet and it’s people, yet DEFRA want to peal off the bark that protects us from pests and problems.
Removing BPS will have far more negative environmental results, than positive, and reduce the core resilience the farming industry had, Scotland and wales can see that.
while I am sure you have zero to do with policy, and even if you agreed even if only in part you can change nothing, we hope your pointing out what farmers think of the the car crash the new system is going to be, to the politicians.

It would be a shame if you did not, even the little boy knew to put his finger in the leak in the dam, even if he ultimately couldn’t stop the flood.

I as always will try to keep an open mind and look at the new updates to the new schemes, but so far they miss by a mile.
A question
What does the maths say if you Total up the area of land that would be in your scheme if you had the first 100 ha of land every uk farmer claims on and how much money that would cost, if payout was at BPS rates?
then adjust the cross compliance rules so the land in that first 100ha of every farm has to hit your goals that you expect to get for that amount of money. What does that look like?
As far as budget, cost to deliver, and target goals, your after?

be honest is that harder to deliver than the current schemes your planning?
Especially if you used points like the old ELS scheme used to work out if the farm was hitting targets.

Sorry that got long fast.

Brilliantly put. thank you.