Opinion: If there is an SFI27, I won’t be wasting my time on it
© Tim Scrivener As the nights darken, so too has the farming mood. The warm and dry summer is but a distant memory and winter is looming.
I’ll be honest – I’m struggling physically and mentally with the load I am carrying already and winter only brings extra work, more stress and inevitably more problems.
See also: Opinion – what if expansion or diversification aren’t options?
About the author
I have written before about diversification projects we had planned and the biodiversity schemes which I was interested in doing.
Slowly each one of those projects, and many other ideas too, have gone any the wayside, the glimmer of hope for something new, snuffed out.
Each new project or idea remains at the idea stage, the headspace I have is taken up by day-to-day jobs and as the list of those gets longer, the potential for expansion or another interest is made smaller.
It’s like walking through quick sand, the faster my legs go, the further I seem to sink, submerged by the suffocating workload.
I see farmers featured in this and other magazines, proudly showing off successful diversification projects or rapidly expanding their farms.
Friends managing kids, making cakes and cooking three meals a day, while farming and still holding down a full-time job and I wonder why I can’t do that, why I can’t seem to manage to walk down the yard without forgetting what I had ventured out for.
All credit to these farmers for holding it all together and driving forward despite the setbacks that are constantly thrown at you.
Our latest setback was the “launch” of the SFI in September.
The debacle has been well publicised and farmers all over the country are rightly still furious that the scheme was a free-for-all and your success at getting an application submitted was basically dependent on whether you were lucky enough to have a decent internet connection and didn’t have any farming to do that morning.
I spent hours deciding which options to put where, creating spreadsheets and designing a scheme which would work for our farm.
I logged on, which for some I know was the first hurdle, and began getting my options on the fields. All good, I thought.
But alas, after six parcels the error codes flagged and I couldn’t put options onto fields which I knew were compatible.
After spending hours trying to sort it out, the scheme closed before I could fix anything.
I can’t use language strong enough here to tell you how this makes me feel. My time is precious and there is no one to cover for me while I sit staring at a computer.
Yet again Westminster has shown us what it really thinks. Ministers might say they care but the ugly truth is that to them we are just the peasants fighting over the spoils.
If there is an SFI offer in 2027, I won’t be wasting my time with an application.
I refuse to be beholden to the powers that be any longer. That’s the one positive takeaway from this sorry situation.
If we aren’t dependent on government money, we can’t be told what to do anymore.
No letters will wing their way through the post requesting an inspection to check if our hedges and field corners are properly managed.
That might just be enough to get me through what’s going to be a tough, dark winter.