DEFRA's Blog

In this post, I'll provide an overview of capital grants for environmental land management, the current offer and recent updates. 

Today, we published a summary of recent changes to the actions and scheme information for the expanded Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) on GOV.UK. This post summarises the changes.

On Thursday 26 September, we’re holding a webinar for farmers to go through the guidance, actions and detail for the expanded Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) offer. In this post, I share a few more details and the link for you to attend.

As part of the Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) programme, managed locally by the North York Moors National Park Authority, funding has been allocated to several projects within Fryup Dale. In this post, the project team shares its work to improve water quality in the North York Moors, from wetland creation to enhancing farm infrastructure. 

This month, Natural England published its annual report summarising projects of the Agri-Environment Scheme Monitoring & Evaluation Programme. In this guest post, Natural England’s Usha Waygood, Senior Officer in the Evidence Directorate, highlights some of the team’s findings from the report.

The endorsed action, GRH6: Manage priority habitat species-rich grassland, is now on GOV.UK and is available to include in your Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) application through the Rural Payments service. In this post, we’ll give a brief recap on endorsed actions and summarise GRH6. 

The Farming Resilience Fund offers free, tailored business support to help farmers and land managers plan during the early years of the agricultural transition. With over 100 actions available through the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) a range of grants to explore and with the advice offer ending in early 2025, now is a good time to talk to an adviser and plan for the future. 

In April, we published our response to the Independent review of protected site management on Dartmoor. We agreed with the recommendation to create a land use management group. I'm pleased to say that the position of chair has just been advertised. In this post, I'll share a short summary and provide links to learn more.

It's been a while since our last post. We’re glad to be back! Over the past month, we've been welcoming Defra's new ministerial team, who are fully committed to environmental land management schemes. We've been working with them to optimise our schemes and grants for farmers, food security and nature recovery. In this post, we’ll update you on the SFI rollout, provide links to new supplementary scheme guidance and share details on endorsed actions and capital items.