Agriculture: Buckinghamshire
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps she is taking to help ensure that agri-environment funding remains accessible to small and medium-sized farms in Buckinghamshire.
Answered by Stephen Morgan
To date smaller farms have been less likely to be in agri-environment schemes such as SFI. A quarter of SFI money goes to just 4% of farms, which isn't fair.
SFI26 will have two application windows to ensure as many farmers as possible can benefit from a SFI agreement. Window 1 will open from June 2026 for small farms with between 3 and 50 hectares and also farms without an existing Environmental Land Management agreement.
The Government is specifically targeting these two groups (before opening to applications from all farmers) because it wants to bring more of them into SFI.
Window 2 will open from September 2026 for all farms.
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