It’s two weeks since the UK took centre stage at COP26 and talked about playing a world leading role in tackling the climate and ecological crises.  The first significant announcement from Defra since then does not give much cause for celebration.  Today’s paper on the new Sustainable Farm Incentive is at best lacklustre, at worst a lurch backwards.

Globally, agriculture is the single biggest cause of wildlife loss and is responsible for over 10% of carbon emissions.  It would be wrong to blame most farmers for this.  They have simply been responding to the subsidy regime and market demands placed on them, and it’s a tragic but unavoidable reality that it often pays more in the short term for a farmer to degrade natural capital than to sustain it.  Happily, a growing number of farmers are keen to show what regenerative agriculture can do to make their crucial industry part of the solution rather than the problem.   If they are to do this, they need a subsidy system that helps them – a point made strongly in the National Food Strategy published in July.

There are a number of elements to the new system that Defra is designing following our departure from the EU, but the Sustainable Farm Incentive is at the core.  Its aim is to help ensure that all farms adopt good standards of husbandry – increasing soil health, reducing carbon emissions, minimising run off and pollution of watercourses and upholding animal welfare standards.

Over the last few months we have seen a gradual weakening of the draft proposals, and a rowing back from the government’s often stated commitment to ensure “public money for public goods”.  There are many reasons why the scheme announced today falls well short of what we need, but here are three of them. 

• First, payment rates are too low to help smaller farmers.  This is a fundamental flaw for a county like Devon, which has one of the highest proportions of small farmers of anywhere in the UK.  Smaller farmers have a critical role to play in bringing nature into recovery and restoring soil health.  Perhaps this is why Defra has set itself the worryingly low target of 70% uptake
• Secondly, there is no clear vision or objectives for the scheme, so we know little about the direction Defra is heading in or what the scheme is intended to achieve.  There is hardly any mention of nature’s recovery anywhere in the proposals.  The fact that agreements are only due to last for three years does little to reassure.  Farmers need a clear sense of direction so they can take long term decisions.
• Thirdly, there is a worrying lack of detail on the regulatory baseline.  Payments seem to be directed at rewarding very basic practices rather than enhancements, so it’s hard to see how the scheme is going to drive positive change.  

When the UK left the EU a great deal was made of the opportunity to move from the much maligned Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) to a far better and more flexible system, benefitting farmers, nature and the climate.  What the government has announced is depressingly similar to the old CAP, with its low level compromise, lack of ambition and administrative complexity.

In Devon today, most wildlife is in decline, most farms are net emitters of carbon and run-off from agricultural land remains the single biggest reasons why river quality is so low – significantly more than the problem of sewage discharge, which has had much more news coverage.   Farm businesses across the county are facing a tough future, and it’s difficult to see how many of them will survive without fundamental changes to the subsidy regime.  If Defra care about the future of farming, nature and our climate, it needs to do a whole lot better than this.