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.
On Friday 26 January, we held a webinar for farmers. During the session, we went through the actions and payments available through our environmental land management schemes in 2024. This post includes a link to the recording.
Tenant farmers are at the heart of the rural economy, managing a third of all farmland in England. To meet our food security and environmental objectives, we must make sure that all farmers, including tenant farmers, can access our schemes and build thriving farm businesses. In this post, we’ll explain how we are continuing to design our schemes with tenant farmers in mind. We’ll provide an update on how we are embedding an understanding of the tenanted sector across Defra. We’ll also summarise the progress we’ve made so far.
Today we published an update to the Agricultural Transition Plan on GOV.UK. It includes our progress, priorities and plans for the coming years. In this post, I'll share a summary of the update which includes details of scheme payment rates, premium payments, new actions and plans for a single application service.
We recently held a webinar for arable and horticulture farmers. Our aim was to go through the 2023 Sustainable Farming Incentive offer for those farm types and answer your questions. In this post, I'll share a summary of the things we covered and set out the offer for these sectors.
The Wigan Greenheart Landscape Recovery project covers a combined area of approximately 1,446 hectares in Lancashire. In this post, project manager Tony Da Silva shares an overview of the site, its history and the project team's ambition to support a thriving natural environment in which people, wildlife and agriculture can flourish.
A sustainable network of smaller abattoirs is an important part of the food supply chain. They support food security and maintain a competitive route to the market for a wide range of meat products. In this post, we’ll share the details of a grant designed to support this part of the sector.
On 15 January, we’ll open another round of the Large R&D Partnerships competition. Part of the Farming Innovation Programme, this competition offers a share of £7.8 million to farmers, growers and foresters in England to take forward ideas that improve productivity, sustainability, resilience and move the sector towards net zero. Together with our delivery partners Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), we published the competition guidance today.
In a few weeks’ time, you will once again have the opportunity to apply for an Improving Farm Productivity grant. The grant pays for capital items including robotic, automatic and solar equipment that improve farm and horticulture productivity. To help you prepare, we’ve published guidance on GOV.UK. In this post, I’ll share an overview of the grant, the changes we've made following Round 1 and link to the guidance.
At the end of November, we shared details of a grant designed to help farmers attract private investment into nature. We said we’d blog again when it was time to apply and we’re pleased to say that from today, you can. This post includes a link for you to watch a recording of our webinar on the grant.
As part of the agricultural transition away from the European Union (EU), we’re committed to delivering a better regulation system for farming. At the moment, farmers who receive payments under the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) and some other agri-environment schemes must meet minimum standards to receive those payments. This is known as cross compliance. Cross compliance will end 31 December 2023. We've published guidance about what this means for farmers and land managers on GOV.UK.
On 27 and 28 November, you can come and put your questions to us at the CropTec in Stoneleigh.
Find us at these shows and conferences.
