These programs were developed to replace the old EU subsidy system for farmers, which paid according to the amount of land they managed. The new English system would pay instead for public goods such as improving the environment and enriching biodiversity. But a long delay in implementing the plans – first proposed by Michael Gove when he was environment secretary in 2018 but delayed several times since then – has fueled anxiety that they could be diluted or dropped altogether. In September, when Liz Truss became prime minister, the Observer revealed that the government was now considering weakening or scrapping the schemes. The new environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, has since reassured farming groups that the schemes will remain almost entirely intact, with a full update within the next few weeks. Pilot schemes, known as the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), are now in place and will serve as testers of how the Environmental Land Management (Elms) system will ideally work before it is fully implemented. The schemes pay farmers to improve soil quality, and Countryside Stewardship (CS), which covers issues such as trees, air quality and water quality. But new figures, released in response to a written parliamentary question, show that fewer than 2,000 applications have been submitted to SFI from a rural community of around 83,000 businesses, a figure Labor has called “woefully low”. The payments are designed to protect food security and business stability in rural and agricultural communities. Farmers face issues such as increased fuel, feed and fertilizer costs. The most important stories on the planet. Get all the week’s environmental news – the good, the bad and the must-haves Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Labor is calling on the government to immediately confirm long-term funding for SFI and is telling the authority it will put basic environmental and welfare standards into law to protect British farmers in trade deals. Cambridge MP Daniel Zeichner, the shadow agriculture secretary, said: “The recent chaos and confusion around environmental land management schemes has scared farmers and environmentalists alike and has done nothing to help British farmers. No wonder the adoption of the incentive for sustainable agriculture has been pathetic, when farmers have no guarantee that the target poles will not move again and support is undermined. The new Secretary of State must move quickly to reassure our farmers that they can continue to produce great British food for the country.” Martin Lines, chairman of the Nature Friendly Farming Network, agreed that government criticism of the issue had discouraged farmers from signing up. He told the Guardian: “The confusion over his policy over the summer and the language of a pause or change to what Elms will be has stopped farmers wanting to get involved. “Farmers who can access it really need to log on to the site and see how easy it is to access money for actions they could already be doing or should already be doing to make their business more profitable and to create ground that is enough for food security in the future.” Lines farms winter cereals in south Cambridgeshire and had put off registration until this weekend, but found that those with sufficient land can get many thousands of pounds to apply. “I did mine at the weekend, I had put it off and I didn’t think it would be a lot of money, but when you go through the system and add it up, you get a lot of money,” he said. . A Defra spokesman said: “We support British farmers and in fact we’ve had very positive take-up of the sustainable farming incentive with over 4,000 applications started and good feedback about how quick and simple the process is. “This is a much higher rate of applications than we would normally see for the first few months of other popular schemes such as Countryside Stewardship.”
