Source · Select Committees · Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Recommendation 12
12
Paragraph: 73
A degree of simplicity may be necessary in order to achieve high SFI uptake, and...
Recommendation
A degree of simplicity may be necessary in order to achieve high SFI uptake, and we acknowledge that an approach based on specific actions and parcels of land will work for many farmers. However, Defra should not miss opportunities to also support a more ambitious whole-farm approach to delivering public goods. This could also help farmers produce food both more sustainably and more competitively, by making the best use of their land and reducing costs. Alongside the parcel-based actions within the SFI, Defra should set out a plan to support public goods delivery at the whole-farm level, including using the pilot phase of SFI to evaluate the merits of including a whole-farm standard in the scheme.
Paragraph Reference:
73
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government
Acknowledged
We do want to support a whole-farm approach to environmental land management, and we are continuing to investigate the potential role of land management plans and other elements of policy design to support this through the Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot. Sustainable Farming Incentive standards are designed to support a whole-farm approach to sustainable land management. In contrast to the Countryside Stewardship scheme, the payment applies to all the land entered into the standard, not just the area where the action(s) are taking place. Early rollout of the Sustainable Farming Incentive will operate at a land parcel (field) level. This means that farmers can choose how many of their fields to enter into Sustainable Farming Incentive standards – they do not have to enter their whole farm. This is to provide a low-risk way for farmers to enter into the scheme incrementally, rather than having an ‘all or nothing’ approach, because we know that many farmers prefer to build up new practices in an incremental way over time. Normally, whole fields must be entered into the scheme because the actions make sense at a field level – and that is the basis for making payments. We are not mandating farmers enter their whole farm into the Sustainable Farming Incentive, because this would present a number of challenges including: • where areas of the farm are already receiving payments for similar actions under existing schemes, this would block the rest of the holding coming into the Sustainable Farming Incentive • requiring large holdings made up of a number of different production units to submit a single application is problematic for the industry • land occupied on lets shorter than the Sustainable Farming Incentive agreement may prevent the rest of the holding applying There would also be challenges in establishing what sanctions we would apply if it transpired a customer had left land out of the Sustainable Farming Incentive agreement. The current approach is based on using the payment rate available through standards to incentivise farmers to include as much land as they can into the scheme.