Sustainable Farming Incentive

(asked on 1st February 2023) - View Source

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

To ask His Majesty's Government whether all farmers piloting the Sustainable Farming Incentive are members of their local farmer cluster; and if not, what plans they have to require such farmers to join.


Answered by
Lord Benyon Portrait
Lord Benyon
Minister of State (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 9th February 2023

The SFI pilot is testing a version of SFI with 840 farmers across the country for three years and commenced in November 2021. Those taking part in the pilot represent a broad range of farmers that include owner occupiers and tenants; large and smaller scale businesses; and arable, livestock and mixed farming enterprises. The pilot is testing the end to end operational side of the scheme as well as the delivery and effect of the environmental Actions. Learning from the SFI pilot is feeding back into our policy teams in Defra to help develop and iterate the full schemes. Whilst some farmers within the SFI pilot may already be part of their local farm cluster group, land in the SFI pilot is not subject to any existing additional agri-environment scheme. This is so we can ensure the learning we gain from our farmers taking part in the pilot is directly related to the elements of the scheme we are testing and learning from.

As we evolve our existing Countryside Stewardship (CS) scheme, this will pay for more locally-targeted actions relating to specific habitats and features that can be done alongside food production. Through CS Plus we plan to increase the impact of the scheme by adding in more ways to incentivise and reward those who work together across multiple holdings to deliver specific environmental outcomes relevant to the locality, and join up connecting habitats across local areas.

Both SFI and CS will be available to all eligible farmers that wish to take part and as we develop these schemes, we will continue to refine the actions with farmers and land managers to make sure they work on the ground, are good value for money, and deliver the intended outcomes for sustainable domestic food production and the environment.

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