“This is exactly what I feared would happen in this SFI window, which opened with half of England’s farmers not in any kind of agreement. The Government is now coming face to face with the full impact of Westminster’s years of inability to invest in farming, food security and nature at the scale required.
“After this summer of extreme weather and climate change, farmers are relying on these schemes to build resilience, yet the rush to get funding means many are compromising on what they can do just to ensure they have an agreement.
“Farmers missing out on this funding puts the Government’s target to halt nature’s decline by 2030 at risk, as they will have to postpone their environmental and habitat contributions for another 12 months. At the same time, if farmers with historic agreements do not get rollover or new agreements, we are going to lose the public goods they were already delivering.
“Farmers in England believed we were moving to a system of public money for public goods, and they are desperate to deliver on that in a tight economic and cashflow situation. While the expansion of the budget for this SFI window was welcome, it was clearly not sufficient and the Government needs to recognise the true level of demand for this funding.”
All gone in six hours: how we got here and what needs to happen now
There are a number of reasons why demand for this round of SFI funding was always likely to be high.
Farmers have faced a wait of around 18 months for new SFI support, since the SFI24 scheme was closed without warning in March 2025. Problems with the design of the scheme introduced by the previous Government, such as a lack of effective controls on spending, meant the SFI24 budget was quickly exhausted.
This meant many farmers had been left without access to funding they had planned their businesses around, with more farmers joining those waiting for SFI26 throughout 2025-26 as old agreements expired.
At the same time, the full phase-out of direct payments means many more farmers are now looking to the Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs) for public investment in agriculture. This puts particular pressure on SFI. As the entry-level scheme, it is open to all farmers, unlike the more targeted and restricted Countryside Stewardship (CS) and Landscape Recovery (LR) schemes.
The roughly £2 billion a year allocated by the Government to ELMs is not enough, with independent analysis suggesting that at least £3.1 billion a year is needed. But increasing the budget alone will not solve the problem. SFI also needs major improvements to avoid a messy and stressful free-for-all, with farmers scrambling to secure a place in limited funding rounds.
Our head of policy, Jenna Hegarty, explained: “Currently the SFI is like a long list of ingredients that farmers are able to pick from, but without any direction or advice on the meal that is actually supposed to be prepared. We need to move to much more guided choices, with actions grouped together into bundles designed for specific environmental outcomes such as boosting soil health or supporting farmland bird recovery.
“The scheme also needs to support and drive whole-farm planning, recognising the interdependence between land producing food, fibre and feed and land providing ecosystem services or environmental goods. This can be built into the scheme design and facilitated through advice, training and peer-to-peer learning.
“We must also ditch the frenzied, time-limited application windows. These bring undue stress to farmers and, to return to the cooking analogy, mean that many farmers are forced to abandon important ingredients in order to get their applications submitted. And they are the lucky ones: many never made it to the checkout at all.
“These are major issues, and difficult ones for a Government that has committed to stability for the rest of this parliamentary term to address. But situations like the one we have just seen cannot go unaddressed.”
