Farm visits are a useful way for us to understand the context in which farmers work and what’s important to them. In this post, I'd like to share what I learned during a recent visit to Challacombe Farm on Dartmoor.
If you want to encourage more of the right wild plants and insects on a group of farms, what parts of your farm should you target to get the best results? This is the question conservation scientist Dr Robert Hawkes explored with colleagues from the University of East Anglia, the Breckland Farmers Wildlife Network and Defra.
In July, we opened the applications window for farmers to join our Sustainable Farming Incentive pilot. In this post, Lisa Applin (Rural Payments Agency) and Tom Lewis (Future Farming and Countryside Programme) share the results of the application process, what the team learned and what they will do next.
The Farming Forum recently held a Q&A session with Janet Hughes, Defra’s Future Farming and Countryside Programme Director. Farmers were invited to submit their questions about the Sustainable Farming Incentive. Clive Bailye, Director of the Farming Forum, put the most-asked questions to Janet. This is part 1 of 2.
We went to these shows intending to talk about the changes coming in the farming sector, but just as importantly, to listen to concerns and learn from different experiences. Some themes emerged from the conversations we had. This post is about what we heard, and how we're responding.
We’re happy to share that we are taking forward 31 proposals to develop into new tests and trials. In this post, we'll give an overview.
The Future Farming Advice team is responsible for making sure that people have the advice they need to support them through the agricultural transition and beyond. In this post, I’ll give you an overview of our work. I’ll share some of our findings and explain what we’re doing next.
We ran some co-design workshops in November with farmers and other experts to help us work out how the regulatory system needs to change. We shared the outputs of that work on the blog. After those workshops, we began planning the next phase of our co-design work on regulation. I’d like to share our progress in this post.
In this blog post, I’ll share how we have worked with the farming community to develop the standards for the Sustainable Farming Incentive from 2021.
One of the areas we’re looking at is how much advice and guidance farmers and land managers might need in our new schemes. We’ve got 43 tests and trials exploring this and in this post we’ll share the latest findings.