Let me start by saying I am not a farmer. However, I have spent the last 2 years of my life working with farmers, farm business advisors, land agents, agronomists and many more people to build a tool designed to help access and manage the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme. As I said, I am not a farmer, but what I am is someone deeply familiar with poor mental health - stress, anxiety, panic attacks, and depression (all the fun stuff) - and what I saw unfold yesterday was one massive trigger event that sent a shock through the whole industry.
At the highest level, the SFI scheme is a brilliant idea. Farmers are encouraged to perform actions on their farms that benefit the environment, and therefore all of us, and in return they get paid vital funding that helps them keep their businesses afloat in a volatile agricultural market. The reality on the ground is something else. The complexity of the scheme is overwhelming. I have a PhD in Astrophysics (oh lah di dah) and my full time job for the last 2 years has involved understanding the scheme, and honestly I still feel like I don't have a complete grasp. What hope does someone who is busy trying to run another business have?
Even if you do have the time and resources to get to grips with the scheme, or the money to pay someone else to help, that's not enough to secure the funding. You also need to be extremely well-prepared, and lucky. The SFI scheme is designed to be "non-competitive". That means that, compared to other similar schemes where anyone can apply and then a fraction of people are awarded the funding after a review stage, SFI has a fixed budget and anyone who makes an eligible application is awarded the funding on a first-come-first-served basis until the budget runs out. The irony being, that if there is more demand than budget available (which is what we saw yesterday) then it becomes extremely competitive, as it then is a game of who can apply quickest as soon as the application window opens...
So what happened yesterday? SFI26 Window 2 was opened for applications. It had a £233m budget. The majority of farms in England were eligible to apply. DEFRA had announced weeks in advance that it was (hopefully) going to open on 22nd September. There was no mention of what specific time of day it would open. People had to just keep refreshing their browser. Everyone in the country trying to access SFI was poised. One agent I work with told me he first got up at 1am to check, then set an alarm to repeat every hour to keep checking through the night. In the end it opened at 10am on the dot. DEFRA announced it through their Farming Blog... half an hour later. By that time it was already clear there were issues.
The system was telling people they were not eligible for things that they were certain they could apply for. One farmer I spoke to said he was faced with this issue and managed to get through to a Rural Payments Agency agent (the people who manage the scheme) on the phone, who told him that the functionality they have been talking about putting in place for weeks to support these applications was "not available yet" and to just keep refreshing his browser until it works.
2 hours into the window we got the first progress announcement on the DEFRA Farming Blog - 25% of the budget already allocated. That was to be expected. We knew a lot of people would apply right away. We saw the same in Window 1 back at the end of June. What we didn't see coming was the next announcement just 80 minutes later to say 50% was gone! 90 minutes after that, 75% gone. That's when it became clear that this was a proper foot race and many people were going to miss out. Just before 4pm, less than 6 hours after it opened, SFI26 Window 2 was closed. Thanks for playing.
As the dust was still settling I started to hear from the farmers and agents I know well. It became clear the technical issues had tripped up a lot of farmers, already not confident of their understanding of the scheme and its complex eligibility rules. They felt they must have done something wrong, and in the delay caused by trying to figure it out, they didn't get their application in on time. I heard, through a colleague, of one farmer who thinks they will now have to sell the farm.
A lot of agents and advisors I was talking were telling me they got maybe half of their clients' applications in. The other half were the unlucky ones who just happened to be further down the list. As soon as the window closed those agents had to start the job of calling their farmers and telling them the bad news. Not a fun job. One agent told me he was so shook up by it he thought he was having a stroke. Another told me she had 80 clients who missed out and she doesn't know if her business will survive.
DEFRA has already announced they are looking into cases where people's applications were blocked by technical issues, but the reality is a huge fraction of farmers who tried to access the scheme will have missed out, and the experience of going through it will potentially have cost them as much (or more) mentally, financially, and time-wise as the potential funding they have missed out on.
SFI is a brilliant idea in theory, but this approach to allocating the budget needs a proper rethink if we want to avoid causing this kind of distress to people across the industry. It's so important that we all help protect our environment, but what massively enables that is ensuring the real people on the ground are in a confident and positive frame of mind. As the saying goes "put your own oxygen mask on before helping others".
Lastly, I've had a lot of people call me in the last 24 hours and many of them are essentially asking the same question - "is it just me, am I alone in this?" The answer is no.
At JustFarm we are collecting as much feedback from farmers and agents as we can regarding their experience of SFI26, and we will share it with DEFRA and the RPA. If you want to add your own experience you can tell us about it here:
