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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to introduce greater (1) environment, and (2) welfare, standards in farming.

Food production and environmental protection must go hand in hand. We want sustainable agriculture, so we want to work with farmers to deliver some of the environmental ambitions that we have.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) will incentivise farmers to look after the assets that protect our food security – like soil – and boost nature recovery. We have seen an explosion of interest in regenerative farming practices such as mob grazing, the use of herbal leys, companion crops in arable fields to help manage pests and diseases and the use of cover crops and green manures like phacelia and nitrogen fixing legumes to reduce fertiliser input costs. The SFI is a flexible support mechanism that will help fund whatever an individual farmer judges is right for their own holding in this space. We are starting the early rollout of the SFI with these soils standards because healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable farming and underpin a range of environmental benefits, as well as production. It will expand to cover integrated pest management, hedges and much more over the next few years. We will not tell farmers what they have to do in detailed prescriptions but we will support the choices they make.

Animal health and welfare, genetic resources and our native breeds are a public good and it is right that the Agriculture Act recognised this for the first time. This year we will open the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway starting with a funded annual vet visit for livestock enterprises so that a trusted vet can offer strategic advice on animal health and welfare; managing pressing endemic diseases which have a major impact on farm profitability; and making recommendations on grants, available next year, to further improve welfare on farms.

Many farms have a corner of their holding that is less productive and contributes little to food production or profit margins and where it is possible to create more space for nature. We already have over 31,000 farmers in our Countryside Stewardship schemes who are doing just that and being paid for it. This year we have bumped up the payment rates for many of the interventions by 30 percent both for those already in and those seeking to join and we are looking at the whole issue of what the EU termed “ineligible features” - the patches of scrub or the dew ponds in valleys that are actually an environmental asset to be rewarded not an ineligible feature to be penalised. Almost half of farmers are already engaged in some way.