As outlined in the Chancellor’s announcement, we have secured a budget of £2.4 billion for the next financial year. This means we can maintain the momentum of our environmental land management (ELM) schemes, which will rise to the highest funding levels ever by 2025/26.
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 2 of 2.
Although we’ve written about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, we thought it might be useful to provide some rationale for our test and learn approach to designing and rolling out reform.
We recently published a blog post about the things we learned at this summer’s agricultural shows which took place up and down the country. At most of those shows, we ran co-design taster sessions for members of the farming community, so they could get a sense, first-hand, of how they could shape our policies. In this post, we're going to talk about some other things we learned that directly relate to co-design.
Over the last couple of years, a group of farmers, supported by vets, specialists and Defra colleagues have worked together to design a way to help fellow farmers bolster the health and welfare of their stock, whilst at the same time improving their bottom line. We’re calling it the Animal Health and Welfare Pathway. In this post, I'll share more.
One goal of Defra’s Future Farming and Countryside Programme is to help farmers and land managers achieve bigger, better environmental benefits. There’s a lot that farmers can do individually on their own land, but there are often circumstances where it makes more sense for several people or businesses to join forces and collaborate on something that benefits all of them, as well as the environment. We want to encourage more collaboration like this.
Farmers can play a critical role in tackling the nature and climate crises, but do they also have an important role in assessing the health of the natural environment too? This is the question the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) posed as part of a Defra-funded test and trial.
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.
In this video, Suzanne Fletcher from the Peak District National Park and Tom Munro from the Dorset Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty explain the Farming in Protected Landscapes application process and give you some ideas of the projects you could do on your farm.
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.
On 5 February, we are attending:
Come and say hello to our team.
You can also find us at these agricultural shows and conferences in 2025.
