Details of the new SFI standards announced by DEFRA

Tue 31 Jan 2023

Last week DEFRA announced further information on the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) standards that will be available for application later in 2023. These new standards build on the soils and moorlands standards announced in May 2022. 

The new standards are designed to be more flexible so farmers can choose the combination of actions that best suit their farm. Some of the actions are rotational so that farmers can incorporate them into their farm system and annual rotation. These new standards are in addition to the annual management payment of £20/hectare for the first 50 hectares of land entered into SFI to cover any administration costs announced earlier this month.

The Government needs farmers to undertake the right combinations of actions, in the right places, and in a locally-joined up way, to deliver the intended outcomes for the environment and climate, alongside food production. SFI will keep on evolving over the coming years to encourage and enable farmers to deliver the outcomes in a way that makes the scheme attractive and workable for them.

A summary of each new standard and the actions and payment rates available is as follows:

Countryside Stewardship

The application window for Higher-Tier and Mid-Tier applications will open in February and March 2023 or agreements starting on 1st January 2024. This will be the last application window for CSS in its current form.  From 2024 it will be rebranded as “CS plus” with a slightly wider range of options available.  This will be a process of evolution of the existing scheme rather than the introduction of the intended ‘Local Nature Recovery’ scheme.  More details on how this will look will be announced during the course of 2023.

The new SFI standards are designed to be more flexible, as well as incorporating some of the options historically available under CSS, and so if you’re looking at the more simplified Wildlife Packages under CSS for an application this year, it will be worthwhile reviewing what is available under the new SFI standards. It may be possible to have this in one scheme under SFI rather than having two separate schemes, with payment rates for land-based actions being the same under both schemes.

For more details on any of the above schemes and the options available to you and your farming business, please do not hesitate to contact our inhouse experts, Ella Redrup and Lucy Turner on 01507 350500 Option 3 to find out more.