Back Issues

Walk across our winter bird food plots on a grey afternoon in November, and the noise is something else. Finches, buntings, linnets, the odd covey of English partridge getting up under your feet. By late winter, it’s close to deafening. In summer, the same fields were chest high in flower, humming with bees and butterflies, and I’ve lost count of the letters, cards, emails and comments over the gate from people in the village asking what we’re doing, telling me how good it looks and how much they appreciate it.

This is the last winter of it. Our SFI 2023 agreement finishes on 28 February 2027 and what replaces it is a good deal thinner. So, it seems like a fair time to look at what the scheme did for us, and why the way it’s ending leaves me uneasy about where we’re heading.

We were in from the start. We went into the SFI pilot in 2021. The money wasn’t the reason (there wasn’t much of it); I wanted a hand in how the thing was built. If Defra were going to design what replaced BPS, I’d rather be in the room arguing than outside complaining. It was clear from day one that the scheme was a long way from perfect, and handing that feedback straight to Defra felt like the only way we’d end up with something fit for purpose, a scheme that actually delivered public money for public goods. And to be fair, they listened, and plenty of that feedback found its way into what came next.

Then SFI 23 came along, and for a farm like ours it solved a problem I’d been chasing for 30 years.

Combinable crop farms on light land have never had a reliable break crop. Oilseed rape was the answer for a generation, and as easy as it is to blame the flea beetle and the loss of neonicotinoids for finishing it, the truth is we wore it out. OSR was the only break that paid, so we grew it far too often for far too long, and the beetle, the pigeons and the slugs caught up with us.

The obvious alternative is pulses, which on our soils are very much a wish crop. You either wish you hadn’t grown them or wish you’d grown more, and you never know which until the combine is in. I’ve tried many other alternative crops in my quest for a consistent margin. Lupins, soya, winter peas, linseed, millet, canary seed and oats have all been grown here with varying degrees of success, and not one of them has given me that holy grail: the consistently profitable break crop. We’ve grown potatoes in the past too, but roots don’t sit well within a no-till system and there’s no guarantee of profit in them either. High stakes, high risk and high fixed costs, none of which frankly I’m brave enough for anymore.

The solution SFI 23 offered was a break crop that never needed harvesting. By putting summer pollinator mixes and winter bird food into the rotation as a full season, unharvested cover, we ended up with the simplest system I’ve ever run: two cereals, then a year of cover. What came out of production gave us a guaranteed margin, no synthetic inputs, and a proper gap in the cereal rotation that no cash crop had ever given us.

The result surprised me. After nearly 20 years of direct drilling and cover crops, I thought I knew what our soils could do. A full season under a living mix that never sees a combine was another level again. The wheat behind it needed less nitrogen, the structure on our worst sand changed in a way you could feel on the spade, and the natural capital was there in abundance, obvious to anyone driving past, let alone anyone walking their dog along the footpaths that criss-cross the landscape around our farm. On marginal ground like ours, that was decent value for the taxpayer, and better value than another field of oilseed rape, the crop that for years gave the countryside its predominantly yellow hue each May.

Still a long way from perfect, and with a lot more room for improvement, SFI was nonetheless heading in the right direction, and that’s a sentence I don’t write about Defra very often.

Then the problem shifted: from refining the detail of what was on offer to who was administering it. A revolving door of farming ministers, and a scheme born under a Conservative government, then inherited by a Labour one that seems at best indifferent to farming and at worst hostile to it, meant the question stopped being how good the scheme was and became who could get at it. Your agreement date decided your rules. Caps came and went, percentage limits appeared, start dates moved, and I ended up with neighbours farming the same soil and crops under different rules to me, purely on the strength of when their paperwork went in. Then in March 2025, the whole thing shut without notice and anyone not already in was told to wait.

That was the start of the haves and the have-nots; an industry divided by nothing more than paperwork and a calendar.

Announced in February, SFI 26 came in two windows. Window 1 in the summer was for small farms and those without an agreement, and rightly so, because those were the people the earlier rules had shut out. Window 2 in September was for the rest of us, with a cap of £100,000 per agreement and a pot of £233 million for the whole of England.

Our existing agreement runs out in February, so I had to have a plan, and the cap changed everything. Taking whole fields out of production for a full season doesn’t fit under it, so the design brief for the new scheme was the opposite of the old one. Keep the gross output of the land, take as little as possible out of production, and be rewarded for the things we do while growing cash crops that benefit the environment.

Our new agreement is built around what we do rather than what we don’t: direct drilling, no insecticides, variable rate nutrition, companion cropping, a multi-species cover in every gap between harvest and drilling, and how we manage our hedges. The pollinator and bird food mixes haven’t gone altogether, but they’ve shrunk to the awkward corners and poorer parcels where I’d struggle to grow a decent crop anyway.

Plenty would say that is how it should be – food on the good land and birds in the corners – and in principle I don’t disagree. In practice, we’ll do a fraction of the good of the last three years.

Then came 22 September.

Window 2 opened on the Tuesday morning. By three o’clock, Defra said three quarters of the money was gone, and at 3.48 pm it closed with the lot allocated. The Farming Forum thread that morning told the story. Farmers refreshing a page that wouldn’t load, agents with a dozen clients and one pair of hands, and members calling it what it was, madness. The farming minister’s line was that SFI had been built to be “simpler and fairer”. Within a week, over a hundred MPs had written to the secretary of state about those who had missed out.

I was in London that day, nowhere near a desk. Our application went in from my phone by lunchtime, because the homework was done. The plan was drawn up months earlier, and I’d used AI to check the guidance, test the plan against the cap and, when the window opened, submit the application for me.

I’m glad we’re in. If we weren’t, the next three years on light land at today’s prices would have been unthinkable. On the AHDB numbers, four of the five worst harvests on record have come since 2020, and this year’s is forecast to be the smallest yet. Geopolitics far beyond the control of any British farmer has compounded it, with fuel and fertiliser at prices that are hard to justify putting on a field at all. Take that income away from a business like ours, and it breaks.

Treating an industry like the queue for Oasis tickets is wrong

But it isn’t right that the agreements went to whoever was quickest with a laptop and best at using AI. Treating an industry like the queue for Oasis tickets is wrong, and plenty of good farmers lost that race through no fault of their own because they were drilling, or lambing, or didn’t have a plan ready on 22 September.

Part of me says this is simply budget. The pot is finite and we have to accept it. What I find harder to accept is the way it was done, because the effect has been to set farmers against each other. I’ve watched it play out on the forum in the weeks since. People who missed out angry with those who got in, with their agents, with the neighbour whose application landed twenty minutes before theirs. Whether anyone in Defra meant it or not, divide and rule is what it feels like from the field. The gap I first noticed in 2023 is now a chasm, and with delinked payments down to a few hundred pounds a farm, those on the wrong side of it are, in cold reality, unsupported.

I’ve said it for years and believe it now more than ever: the relationship between farmers and government support has become the same as that between a drug addict and his dealer.

There was a decent case for support once. But a little became a lot, then something we couldn’t do without, and then the dealer knows that he can make you do pretty much anything for the next hit. Look at the hoops we jump through, me included, for schemes we’d never have entertained 20 years ago. Then look at the panic when the supply was cut off one Tuesday afternoon in September. That is withdrawal.

The worst of it is what we didn’t notice while we were high. Thirty years of direct support let a lot slide. A high street of butchers, greengrocers and bakers eroded and was replaced by a handful of supermarkets that now control what Britain eats and what the farmer gets for it. Imports produced to standards that would be illegal on my farm but are legal on a British shelf. Assurance schemes that cost us money and earn us nothing. Red tape upon red tape, and, in the last two years, a tax grab on the farm itself. Each crept in and we put up with it, because the cheque still arrived and took the edge off. The patient’s health was failing the whole time; we just weren’t sober enough to feel it.

I’m not saying go cold turkey. Nobody kicks a 30-year habit by having the supply cut off in an afternoon, and anyone who thinks the market will sort it out has never tried to grow wheat on sand at today’s prices. Getting from a heavily subsidised agriculture to one standing on its own feet, with public money paying only for real public goods, is a long, painful job. It needs honest trade policy, a supply chain with some fairness in it, and regulation that costs less than it earns.

It is possible. I’ve met enough farmers here and in Europe who farm profitably with far less of a crutch than we’ve got used to. It’s clearly not going to happen with the current approach, and the blame doesn’t sit with this government alone. The knife was stuck in by governments of both colours over many years; this one just seems to enjoy twisting it. Whether the next one has the stomach to pull it out, and enough understanding of farming to treat the wound properly, is the question that matters.

In the meantime, this winter I’ll walk the bird food plots and listen to the song. Next winter, most of those fields will be back in oilseed rape, probably foolishly, and a field of rape in January is a quiet place. The birds that fill them now will have to go and find their winter feed elsewhere, and I doubt the locals will thank me for it.

My father told me years ago that farming one year at a time was a sure way to fail in the end, and he was right. It’s why the whole thing feels so precarious now. A rotation is planned years ahead. A soil takes a decade to change. A drill is bought to last 20. None of it can be planned around a scheme that changes every time a minister does, and that is the bit politicians never grasp. Farming is a long game. Consistency matters more to us than the size of the cheque.

Right now, farming is split into the haves and the have-nots, and I’m lucky enough to be a have. I’m well aware of it, and grateful for it. But when I think of the neighbours who aren’t, the fields that won’t be sung over next winter, and how little of any of it was ever in our own hands, somehow, it doesn’t feel much like winning.