Concerns raised over SFI pilot as Defra publishes details of scheme

Payment rates will be broadly equivalent to Countryside Stewardship (see box below), with a plan to update in 2022, and common land is excluded from the pilot.

Dr Aglionby told Farmers Guardian she was disappointed that a full list of actions to be paid for will not be published until June, and that farmers expressing an interest in joining the pilot would not know how much they would be paid for 15 hours of engagement every month.

“The acid test is will farmers be excited and engaged by the offer to enhance their delivery of public goods, or will they conclude they are better off keeping their freedom and ‘going farming’,” she said.

Chris Price, chief executive of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, echoed these comments, saying farmers would struggle to plan ahead with the information made available by Defra.

Operate

He said: “The way the standards will operate is you will be able to stack them up. Any particular farmer will presumably be able to opt for several standards on their farm, so until you know the full range of standards which will be available, it is quite difficult to know how it will apply to your business.

“The easier, more straight forward thing to do is to go down the route of maximising production and intensification, which is the antithesis of what Defra is trying to achieve.

“They now need to move much more quickly than they have to date with rolling out the rest of the standards.”

Dr Richard Benwell, chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, pointed out some options under consideration in the pilot were already regulatory requirements, and suggested they may not achieve real environmental improvement.

Gobble

“They could gobble up vital funds needed to support more environmentally ambitious farming and land management businesses,” he said.

Other concerns have been raised about a change in language, with Defra now referring to the SFI as a scheme in its own right, as opposed to a component of ELMs.

The other two components – Local Nature Recovery and Landscape Recovery – are also being spoken of as individual schemes.

This has led to questions about how the three schemes will interact, what their separation means in terms of the offer for farmers and whether more than one scheme can be entered into at a time.

The RSPB has also demanded that Defra articulate a clear vision for ELM and what it means for the farming sector.

A spokesperson said: “Over the last couple of years it has felt as though Defra’s ambition for the scheme has been waning, but with the launch of the SFI pilot, Defra has the opportunity to reset the level of ambition and ensure ELM works for farmers while delivering significant public benefits.”