Opinion: Government is ‘quietly withdrawing’ green payments
Joe Stanley © Tim Scrivener Defra published its Farming Roadmap 2050, the government’s strategic plan for English agriculture for the next 25 years, in June.
It aims to give farmers clarity to invest and adapt amid the myriad challenges we face so that by 2050 we might see a farming sector that is more profitable, productive, resilient and sustainable.
So far, so good – and at 73 pages it’s a better effort than the 83 words grudgingly dedicated to agriculture in Labour’s last manifesto.
Yet, amid the warm words and glossy photos of now-departed ministers, one key element leaps out: from 2030 the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) as we know it will change radically.
See also: Opinion – land values defy the reality of farming
About the author
Joe Stanley 
Farmers Weekly Opinion writer Joe Stanley ARAgS is head of sustainable farming at the Allerton Project and author of Farm to Fork: The Challenge of Sustainable Farming in 21st Century Britain. Views expressed in his columns are his own. Read more articles by Joe Stanley
Government will step back from supporting farmers to deliver more nature- and climate-friendly farming practices “as environmental outcomes currently funded through [SFI] become embedded in good farming practice and regulation, or as funding for environmental outcomes from the wider supply chain and private finance expands”.
This is significant. Since the days of Michael Gove, the social contract extended to farmers pledged that government would pay for delivery of “public money for public goods” and that access to the primary mechanism for delivering those goods – SFI – would be limited only by an individual farm’s ambition.
Not only do we stand today at the threshold of a new slimmed-down, tightly capped and highly budget-limited SFI, but from the end of this parliament, Defra no longer intends to pay for the sort of “mitigation actions” that more oppressive regulations can deliver for free (think buffer strips) or the sort of “conversion actions” that it would rather the supply chain or farmers pay for (think cover crops).
In the 2030s, public money will be used only to take land out of production where private money can’t instead be encouraged to this end.
Conceptually (and from a Treasury perspective) this is an elegant plan: why pay farmers to do something you can simply require them to do? Yet it’s also based on heroic assumptions about the growth of private finance in the next few years and the ability of farmers to absorb yet more cost and risk.
Only a few years ago, direct payments – paid equally on every acre in the land – were worth some £2.4bn to English farmers.
Today, the value of all natural capital directed at farmland combined is worth a fraction of that, and is very spatially targeted.
Even Defra’s own Landscape Recovery projects are struggling to get off the ground due to a lack of interest from private investors, who still struggle to see the business case for investing their profits in nature.
Yes, there are long-term benefits to many “conversion” actions (think regen ag) but a recent report by the Allerton Project – From Risk to Reward – commissioned by Nestlé, demonstrated that the transitional period can extract a financial cost from the farm business before benefits manifest themselves, and that extreme weather – now a firm fixture of the farming calendar – only extends that painful period.
It seems remarkable that during my relatively brief stint writing in these pages I’ve moved from a position of alarm at the lack of investment afforded to English food production to alarm that even the environmental payments government literally staked our farms on are being quietly withdrawn.
On the bright side, I suppose you might call that personal growth – or perhaps just policy development.