Skip to main content
Blog Farming
Organisations:
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
Cindy Hughes, Policy Lead, Defra

Cindy Hughes

Cindy is a policy lead in Defra’s Sustainable Farming Incentive team.

Her team is responsible for developing, testing and refining policy for the scheme roll out from 2022. This team works with the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme pilot, tests and trials, and other parts of new environmental land management schemes

CSHT mirror agreements and HLS extensions: an overview 

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Countryside Stewardship, Sustainable Farming Incentive
Close up of grass and flora underneath cloudy skies at All Hallows Marshes, Hoo, Kent.

If you have a Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier (CSHT) agri-environment agreement that expires in 2024 or Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) agreement that expires in 2024 or 2025, we want to support you as you transition to our environmental land management (ELM) schemes. In this post, I’ll share an overview for those with CSHT and HLS agreements.

How the Sustainable Farming Incentive will develop

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: environmental land management schemes, Sustainable Farming Incentive

Last week we published details on how the new Sustainable Future Incentive scheme will work in 2022. The Sustainable Farming Incentive in 2022 is very much a starting point. We are rolling out the scheme incrementally. We want to test, learn and improve as we go, and expand the scheme to fit the available budget each year. In this post, I'll give you an idea of how the scheme will expand over the next few years.

Related content and links

About us

This blog is managed by Defra’s Farming and Countryside Programme.

On this blog, we explain the reforms to agricultural policy in England.

We share what we’re working on, what we’re learning and how you can get involved.

Find out more

New: drafts of further endorsed SFI actions

We’ve published drafts of an additional 14 SFI endorsed actions. Once we take stakeholder feedback on board, we expect these actions to be available from summer 2025.

Funding for farmers, growers and land managers in England

GOV.UK is the place to find official guidance and information.

Funding for farmers, growers and land managers sets out every payment on offer with links to learn more.

Get advice

The Farming Resilience Fund provides free, independent business support to farmers. If you’ve received direct payments since October 2022, you’re eligible. 

The Farming Advice Service (FAS) provide free, confidential advice to farmers and advisers.

Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) helps farmers in England protect water, air and soil. CSF advisers can provide advice on best practices and specific SFI actions that will benefit your farm business and the environment.

We’ve compiled a list of organisations offering wellbeing support to those in the farming community.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive

Thumbnail image showing link to SFI site - farmer in foreground and cows behind.

Find out how SFI can work for you.

Webinars in 2025

Attend upcoming webinars and watch recordings.

BPS and delinked payments

Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in England will be replaced with delinked payments in 2024.

Learn how they’re calculated and who’s eligible.

Sign up and manage updates

Using this blog

Comments, moderation and feedback.

Follow us