Sustainable Farming Incentive 24 roll out
With BPS payments reducing, many farmers are turning their attention to other schemes to address the shortfall. The Sustainable Farming Incentive is the latest offering. Recently DEFRA have announced the latest iteration of this scheme where it will merge with mid-tier to now contain a total of 102 options.
Although many of the new options are a welcome addition to the 2023 scheme, some more restrictive rules have also been brought over to some of the existing SFI actions. These changes in the wording of some actions will not affect those who already have a live agreement, but it may make some of the actions we are already familiar with less appealing going forward under the new scheme.
SFI 24 still contains some easy funding offers that all farms could benefit from for actions such as soil sampling, nutrient management planning as well as integrated pest management planning, all of which farms should be doing anyway and is included in our compliance folders as standard, so why not make use of the funding. There are also still the familiar range of land-based options such as herbal leys, multi-species winter cover and no use of insecticide on arable crops as well as new actions such as dry-stone wall management payments, winter cover following maize and no-till farming, all of which could prove popular to many. There are also a range of organic payments introduced as well as supplement payments to stack with low input grassland such as for haymaking and cattle grazing, which again on the right farm could prove useful payments for management practices they may already be doing.
In short despite this new iteration of the scheme looking a bit less “flexible” than its predecessor it does provide a broader selection of funding options and is something that all farms could well benefit from considering.