Batters: Reformed SFI must focus on food production

Baroness Minette Batters has told MPs that England’s Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) must put greater emphasis on food production if it is to sustain farm profitability and prevent long-term damage to the farming sector.

Giving evidence on her Farming Profitability Review to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) select committee today, the former NFU president said the SFI remains central to farm support but must be reshaped to reflect tighter public finances and the realities of food production and national food security.

She warned that removing the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) without embedding food production into its replacement has left English farming uniquely exposed.

See also: Batters’ Farm Profitability Review finally published’

“No other country in the world has gone purely down the environmental route,” she said. “I believe it is absolutely essential now that we do bring food production into the SFI.”

Baroness Batters said the country must grow food-producing crops such as peas and beans which could deliver “public good benefits, both for the environment, nature, soil and food.”

And she urged the sector to eliminate its reliance on imported soya within a decade to improve resilience and reduce environmental damage overseas.

Different era

She said the challenges facing the SFI, including its sudden temporary closure in March 2025 after the budget was exhausted, were rooted in a policy framework designed by Michael Gove and Dieter Helm when there was a “growing public purse and a growing public investment”, but “that era is gone”.

Defra is set to reopen the SFI in late spring with a focus on small farms and those without existing applications to spread funding more widely.

NFU analysis from 2023 shows England would need a £4bn-a-year farming budget for government to meet its environmental goals.

Baroness Batters speaking at the Efra committee meeting © Parliament TV

But Baroness Batters said given the financial pressures on government, “we don’t have enough money”.

Nevertheless, she insisted that the SFI “can be a really good scheme” and remains “the scheme”, but noted it was never designed to replace the BPS on its own.

She criticised Defra for concentrating higher-tier Landscape Recovery funding among the largest landowners.

“The larger you are, the bigger recipient you will be,” she said, calling this “wrong from what the initial aim was”.

Market monitoring

Baroness Batters said government and industry must provide farmers with better market monitoring tools, adding that current difficulties in the dairy sector showed what happens when supply and demand are not actively managed.

“The fundamental first rule with agriculture is that you manage supply and demand,” Baroness Batters told MPs.

“Because you’re dealing with a fresh product, you can’t just say, well, actually, we’re just going to store this.”

Baroness Batters challenged Defra to deliver its long-term strategy for farming within two years – and include all 57 recommendations in her review.  

“I don’t believe we have much longer than that if we want to save the farming structure that we’ve got in this country,” she said.