Sustainable finance support for farmers in England needs to expand further, beyond its welcome early structure, to address other areas of the food system, a panel of experts said Thursday.

Representatives from a public body, a think tank, and a non-profit said the support needs to focus more on horticulture, carbon, and intensive livestock, during an online Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum panel.

“The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) is sort of good, but it’s only going to support very modest, incremental change,” Dustin Benton, policy director at think tank Green Alliance, said in response to a question from Carbon Pulse.

“We need [modest change] because there are some farmers at the start of their journey, but those farmers who are leading on climate and nature aren’t getting the support that they need through the best bits of Countryside Stewardship or Landscape Recovery.”

UK farmers are transitioning away from a system of basic subsidies towards acquiring public payments for more environmentally conscious practices through land management systems via the SFI, Countryside Stewardship, and Landscape Recovery.

The Landscape Recovery scheme is “great, but rationed” while Countryside Stewardship is moving “far too slowly”, Benton said.

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Ruth Westcott, climate change and nature emergency campaign coordinator at non-profit Sustain, said horticulture and intensive livestock issues need to be better addressed by the support system.

“If you get a payment scheme related to land size and you’re a relatively small-scale horticulture [farmer], the money that you would likely get from the schemes is £200 a year if you only have a small holding,” she said.

“It’s just nowhere near enough when you think about the margins in horticulture.”

The government should introduce a separate scheme for small- to medium-scale horticulture farmers, to enable them to serve local markets while strengthening food security, she added.

Another separate model for helping farmers to move from intensive livestock into more sustainable forms of agriculture is needed, she said.

The number of pig and poultry megafarms increased by 20% to 1,1176 across the UK between 2016 and 2023, according to a report by campaign group Compassion in World Farming.

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Jack Watts, head of economic strategy at government-sponsored Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, stressed that public sustainable farming schemes were in their early days.

However, there is no explicit support for farmers to capture carbon on their land, an “obvious thing” for the sector, he said.

“One of the other areas is there’s no reward for what you’ve already got within your farming system. It’s frustrating for those that already have quite good natural assets on their farm.”

For example, if farmers have always looked after their biodiversity-boosting hedgerows they will not receive rewards due to the lack of additionality, he said.

Additionality is the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not otherwise have occurred.

Last month, the government said it had committed £2.4 billion ($3.1 bln) to supporting British farming to boost productivity, resilience, and food security, while delivering on the environment.

This package includes “the largest ever package of competitions and grants” to foster innovation, bolstered by sustainable farming schemes, it said.

In January, a nature scientist clashed with a farming industry representative about how agriculture should address biodiversity loss in Ireland.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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