Agriculture: Soil

(asked on 23rd November 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps his Department is taking to help improve soil health on UK farms.


Answered by
Victoria Prentis Portrait
Victoria Prentis
Attorney General
This question was answered on 1st December 2021

This is a devolved matter and the information provided therefore relates to England only.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive is one of three new schemes that reward farmers and land managers for producing public goods. The other, future, schemes are Local Nature Recovery and Landscape Recovery, both of which we will begin piloting next year. These schemes will operate together and pay for sustainable farming practices, improve animal health and welfare, improve environmental outcomes, and reduce carbon emissions. They will create habitats for nature recovery and make landscape-scale changes, such as establishing new woodland and other ecosystem services, providing key means to deliver against our 25 Year Environment Plan goals and carbon net zero targets.

Our approach to environmental land management is the cornerstone of our new agricultural policy and will be realised through a combination of schemes, using public money to reward farmers and land managers for delivering environmentally sustainable actions. The schemes are intended to provide a powerful vehicle for achieving the goals of the 25 Year Environment Plan and commitment to net zero emissions by 2050, while supporting our rural economy.

We agree that healthy soils should be a priority outcome for our new environmental land management schemes in England, and to help achieve our commitment to sustainably managed soils by 2030, we are already taking action to support land managers and farmers to achieve sustainable soil management. Firstly, we are focusing on soil in two of the first standards to be rolled out under the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme next year – the Improved Grassland Soils and Arable and Horticultural Soils standards. Recently published details on the Sustainable Farming Incentive set out for which sustainable farming actions to improve soil health farmers will be rewarded, such as the introduction of herbal leys and the use of grass-legume mixtures and cover crops.

It makes sense to start the early roll out of the Sustainable Farming Incentive with these soils standards because healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable farming and underpin a range of environmental benefits, as well as production. The soil standards will be widely applicable and will therefore provide opportunity for many farmers to be rewarded for sustainable soil management. The standards and the overall scheme are designed to support a range of farmers; including those who are beginning to adopt sustainable practices as well as those who are already experienced in these, who will be rewarded for increasing the ambition of their land management. We will test these standards in the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot and release further information on our plans for the Sustainable Farming Incentive on gov.uk in December 2021.

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