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TL;DR:
✒️ 6,000 new SFI agreements during Oct-Dec (32,200 overall)
💰 £663m total annual value (+20.6% / £113m since Q3)
🥇 80% of payments come from just 12 actions (out of 102!)
😶 Vast majority of new options are not being taken-up
🛑 Complexity is slowing SFI roll-out
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs's latest hashtag#SustainableFarmingIncentive (SFI) figures for the final three months of 2024 are out, revealing how England’s flagship farm payment scheme is progressing.
I’ve dug into the numbers so you don’t have to - here’s my take:
🏴 Regional DisparityLincolnshire, East Yorkshire, and Northumberland lead in % signed up.Soil Benchmark is supporting many of these farms; we now cover 735,000ha (22% of the 3.27m ha in SAM1).🌍 Richard has pulled together some great 🗺️ to visualise this👇
🍾 Bottleneck uncorked...The RPA seems to have started getting new agreements up and running again, with 6,000 in Q4 (vs. 900 in Q3).
🐌 ...but still much slower than SFI23SFI23 saw 23,200 farms sign up in its first 9 months 🚀
In six months, only 6,900 farms have signed up for the latest iteration (SFI Extended Offer aka SFI24) ⏱️
If it was just a bottleneck, wouldn’t take-up have bounced back faster? 📈
It seems like the changes have fundamentally made SFI24 less popular than SFI23 was:
🌱 Too Many Niche Options?In SFI23, nearly all 23 actions were popular. 6 months in, only 3 actions were worth less than £1m in total claims.In contrast, SFI24 added 80+ new actions, and most are being ignored by farmers.
🧮 Let's break it down:The 6,900 SFI24 agreements are worth £130m in total:
🥇 £76m comes from the original SFI23 actions retained in SFI24
🥈 £46m comes from just 11 of the new SFI24 actions — things like PRF1 (variable rate nutrients; £4m), SOH3 (summer cover crops; £3m), and HEF1 (historic farm buildings; £25m).
🥉 That leaves 66 actions barely used (<£550k each). 8 unused.
Most are niche actions only relevant to a handful of farms:👉 OFM6 (Organic Top Fruit 🍎): Only 5 farms signed up (£19k total claim).
💰 Is Complexity Putting Farmers Off?Farmers can still just sign up for the popular SFI23 actions, but tens of thousands clearly are being put off - likely by all the niche actions making the process unnecessarily complex.
🚒 Should DEFRA Simplify?Would SFI be better stripped back to the 30 or so most popular options?
💻 Should they push platforms like Land App / Oko Ag to help farmers navigate the complexity while keeping the wide range of options?
🤷♂️ Is this just DEFRA's way of making work for Land Agents - just like they’re helping out Farm Accountants with their IHT changes 🤣
🤔 What do you think Steve Reed MP should do? Is complexity the issue, or is something else causing take-up to stall? Let me know in the comments
👇 Full data here: https://t.ly/I641x
