18th May, 2026
Last year the Sharpham Trust was all set to submit our application to the Sustainable Farming Initiative but then just before the Government announced they were pausing the scheme.
If you haven’t heard about SFI then you’re not alone! This is part of the subsidy scheme for farmers and landowners that distributes public money in return for them managing the land in certain ways. Post-Brexit and our exit from the EU, the Government and DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) has had to design a new subsidy scheme and the signs were positive that they would reward farmers for helping our wildlife. They called it
“Public Money for Public Goods”.
But it became a victim of its own success together with the squeeze on Government spending and so the scheme was paused only to relaunch this coming June. But there have been small but significant changes.
We had planned to apply for a specific subsidy to encourage Species Rich Grassland, a way of encouraging increased biodiversity which would subsidise farmers for the reduced productivity of taking some pressure off the land. But in the relaunch this option has been removed – DEFRA say “It’s being removed as part of the simplification of SFI26 as it required bespoke Natural England adviser endorsement. An equivalent of GRH6 is in the CS Higher Tier offer". More on that here
This small tweak has real impacts because it’s much harder to get into the Higher Tier scheme. You need to be invited to apply. This means less land will be managed in ways benefiting wildlife.
Donna Cox of Moor Meadows says in this article: “In Defra’s own 2024 guidance, the government hailed the action GRH6 as a vital tool to benefit priority species, such as bumblebees, butterflies, birds or bats and to increase the frequency of important plant species’. By removing this action just two years later, they are effectively abandoning the very species they pledged to protect. You cannot arrest the decline of nature while simultaneously withdrawing the funding designed to do exactly that. The Government’s recent landmark national security assessment warned that biodiversity loss is putting the ecosystems we all depend on at risk.”
At Sharpham we will persevere with our wildlife friendly approach, and we are hoping to apply to enter more land into the Higher Tier scheme. If we are to reverse the decline in nature we need to support as many landowners and farmers as possible to make the transition to nature-friendly farming.