Farmer Focus: A sleepless night to get my SFI submitted

The impact of the recent spring and summer droughts on our light land was taken to a whole new level this year. There is even threat of worse weather next year due to the extremely badly behaved El Nino.

I therefore felt it was absolutely essential I got into the latest round of Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) agreements.

See also: How a passion for nature turned into thriving bird food business

About the author

Andy Barr

Andy Barr farms 320ha in mid-Kent, aiming to farm as regeneratively as possible. He stopped ploughing 25 years ago and over this time restructured the business with less land farmed and increased the use of contractors, environmental areas and diversification projects.

Read more articles by Andy Barr

To this end I tried logging on the Rural Payments Agency website just after midnight on the 22 September, just in case. The page wasn’t available yet.

I then awoke at 4am, due to a horrible nightmare in which ploughs and power harrows were tearing up my flower margins and tried again.

The application process eventually came available around 10am and I quickly set to work inputting my pre-planned scheme.

The computer just said “no” to a couple of options in some fields, even though I had checked both myself and with a third party software package that everything was compatible.

I had already decided I would just change them to something that worked or else leave them out and, after an hour or so, the computer said “yes” (or “maybe” at least) and I breathed out again.

I then had to take another deep breath and apply to Natural England to give me consent to carry out these, by the very nature of the scheme, environmentally friendly actions, none of which were on the site of special scientific interest but in fields both near and far from it.

That took even longer than the actual SFI application as I had to type out everything I was going to do deliver the options.

Bleary eyed and foggy headed I sat back in momentary relief before a nagging feeling appeared in the back of my head that there was something else important that I really ought to be doing.

Oh yes, trying to keep the oilseed rape alive and planting the wheat. As a footnote the former is alive and kicking on, but the latter is coming up in patches due to the lack of moisture.