The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust's Allerton Project, a 320-hectare research farm in Leicestershire that has worked in agri-environment schemes for more than 30 years, has been left without a clear replacement for its environmental funding after a technical problem stopped it applying for England's latest Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Farmers Weekly reports.

Staff spent weeks preparing a detailed SFI26 application but could not submit it when the window opened on 22 September. "We were online at 10am to submit the scheme only to find that 'computer said no'," said Joe Stanley, the project's head of sustainable farming.

The problem lay with the farm's small existing SFI23 agreement: because one option, CIPM4: No Insecticide, applies to whole fields, the system would not let the project add other actions to the same fields. Staff spent 352 minutes trying to fix it, including hours on hold to the Rural Payments Agency helpline, but the £253m SFI26 Window 2 fund, heavily oversubscribed, closed less than six hours after opening.

The proposed agreement would have been worth about £85,000 a year and was designed field by field — one field, for example, was to have an erosion-reducing strip beside a pollen and nectar mix under a hedge. The project's Countryside Stewardship Mid Tier agreement expires in December, leaving it "high and dry without a scheme until at least 2027", Stanley said. "For us to be locked out of the scheme that we helped to create is even more remarkable."

"It is ridiculous that the SFI took 10 years to design but gave farmers a six-hour window to apply," said Alastair Leake, the project's director. Defra has said it will consider appeals from unsuccessful applicants, but its website indicates the whole Window 2 budget has been allocated.

Photo: Tim Heaton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Source: Farmers Weekly