Future Farming and Countryside Programme
Last year, ministers commissioned an independent review into protected site management on Dartmoor. Chaired by David Fursdon, the review was undertaken with advice and input from a panel of expert advisers, local farmers and stakeholders. The review aimed to help us better understand how we can work with farmers to deliver much-needed environmental improvements on Dartmoor, balancing this alongside agricultural production, public access and cultural and natural heritage. Today we published our response to the report.
In this post, we’ll give you a summary of the grants to look out for this year.
In June 2023, we launched a consultation on hedgerow protections in England. Today, we published the summary of the responses alongside the government's response. This includes proposed exemptions to the requirements. In this post, I'll share a summary.
It is our mission to create an offer that is workable for every farmer and farm type in England. Upland farmers are a crucial part of our rural communities, economies and landscapes – they are central to the production of high-quality food and other goods. In this post, we set out the offer for upland farmers and share the work we are doing to make sure that it is accessible, broad and rewarding, and that it helps us to achieve our ambitions for food production, productivity and the environment.
The Tenancy Working Group was set up to review how government could better support the tenanted sector. Chaired by Baroness Rock, the group published its findings in the Rock Review. Today, we published our response on GOV.UK.
Through the Future Farming Resilience Fund, any farmer or land manager in England who receives BPS (Basic Payment Scheme payments) is eligible to receive free business advice. In this post, I share the latest list of advice providers and explain how to get in touch.
Following recent media speculation on the future of farming policy in England, we know that you may have some questions about our work. We’ve published a post on Defra's media blog which sets out our response and position.
In previous blog posts we’ve written about how we’re adopting a test-and-learn approach across the Future Farming and Countryside Programme. We’re doing this to make sure our schemes, services and policies work for users before we scale them up. To make sure we’re on track to deliver our ambitions, we have a strategy to help us to monitor, evaluate and learn as we go. In this blog post, I’ll share a high-level overview of the strategy and some examples of how we’re putting it into effect.
More than 4,000 people from across the farming community in England are now working with us to design, pilot, test and trial new farming policies and schemes. In this post, we’ll explain how we’re working with the farming community. We'll also share the 7 co-design principles we’re encouraging groups to follow.
We’re going to do a monthly Q&A session on The Farming Forum. In this post, I'll share our approach to Q&As and links to the ones we've taken part in.
