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.
Over the past few weeks, we've summarised the updates to our environmental land management offer by farm type. These posts follow last month's Agricultural Transition Plan update. In this post, we’ll focus on the updated offer for livestock and grassland farmers.
Landscape Recovery supports large-scale, long-term management of land for the benefit of sustainable food production and the environment. Many of the 22 projects in Round 1 are now halfway through the Project Development Phase (PDP). Our ability to co-design this scheme is founded on open and honest relationships with project teams. In this post, we share a summary of the work to develop long-term agreements.
On Friday 26 January, we held a webinar for farmers to go through the actions and payments available through our environmental land management schemes in 2024. This webinar was held in collaboration with the Farming Advice Service (FAS) and The Farming Forum (TFF). In this post, I’ll summarise the themes and top-voted questions covered in the webinar with responses and links to guidance.
In this episode of the Defra Farming podcast, regional engagement lead Michael Sturla talks to Robin and Christopher Milton. The father and son team farm beef and sheep on the Exmoor uplands and have a Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) agreement. They describe their experience applying for an agreement, the actions they're undertaking and the benefits.
Since launching in 2021, the Farming in Protected Landscapes programme has funded 3,000 projects across England. Together, these projects have created and improved more than 70,000 hectares (ha) of habitat for biodiversity, planted more than 100 miles of hedgerow, more than 100,000 trees and conserved or enhanced 300 historic features, buildings and structures. In this post I'll shine a light on the 3,000th project and share details of an upcoming spotlight series.
On Thursday 8 February, we hosted a webinar for tenant farmers. In the session, we gave an overview of the actions and payments available through our environmental land management schemes in 2024. This post includes the recording of the webinar.
The horticulture industry in England is diverse. As such, we and have a range of different offers available for farmers and growers. Whether you grow carrots or strawberries, daffodils or apples there is support you can access to help increase your productivity, improve the environment and innovate. In this post, we’ll summarise the schemes and grants horticultural famers and growers can access now. We'll also include links for you to join 2 upcoming webinars.
At the beginning of the month, we published a post which summarised the recent Agricultural Transition Plan update. The update includes the full range of new and improved actions plus the payment rates available this year. Following the update, we said we'd set out the offer for each farm type in a series of posts. This post is for arable and horticultural farmers.
In this guest post, vet Alasdair Moffett describes the work of the Upper Axe Landscape Recovery Project team. Their project aims to demonstrate that productive agriculture, the natural environment and a will to counter climate change can co-exist.
I’m pleased to say that you can now apply for an Improving Farm Productivity grant. In this post, I'll explain some additional changes we've made to the offer, give you a recap of other aspects of the grant and include the links you'll need to get started.
On 9-10 January we’re at the Oxford Farming Conference and the Oxford Real Farming Conference.
Come and say hello to our team.
You can also find us at these agricultural shows and conferences in 2025.
