Opinion: ELM scheme tail could wag farming dog
© David Matthew Lyons/Adobe Stock So, Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes turn out to be like the proverbial buses.
We wait ages for one, then three arrive at once, their destination panels neatly labelled Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Countryside Stewardship Plus (CS Plus) and Landscape Recovery.
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While we’re wondering which bus to get on, or even if we can board all three at once, the Ubers of private funding are driving up and down, garishly sign-written with biodiversity net gain bonus and carbon credit cash.
The drivers stop, wind down their windows, ask: “Wanna free ride, mate?”
Conversations with people since Defra brought out its 122-page ELM update at the end of January have convinced me that many on my side (who are advising on it) have yet to get their heads round it all, let alone the farmers it’s aimed at (and who will be implementing it).
Once the full suite of SFI standards gets going and CS Plus emerges, multiple opportunities for blended (public plus private) funding will be available.
But if you’re looking at how much of your Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) you can replace with all this, it will be like going into the Minotaur’s labyrinth: choose your path wisely, and be prepared for what you find at the end of the journey.
Even public funding such as CS suddenly looks less familiar.
You can now apply for a revenue agreement on any unused land in a parcel, with multiple agreements on the same land parcel, as long as there is no overlap – no double funding.
You can throw in an SFI agreement on top, again if existing and new scheme options don’t overlap. This is huge.
After years of not being able to add to an environmental scheme, change it or run another alongside, suddenly anything goes.
Apply for the new SFI revenue payments? Step this way. Add a Higher Tier to your Mid Tier CS? No problem.
Leave your current scheme and sign up to CS Plus? Certainly. But choose wisely, again.
Somewhere between “I can’t see how I’ll fit all this together, let alone manage multiple schemes” and “I do most of this already, so let’s take the money” is a path that avoids both sleepless nights and a knock on your door because, despite the light-touch governance Defra are promising, you have transgressed.
The risk is that in trying to make this all fit together and bring in some kind of return, the ELM tail wags the farming dog.
Decisions about stocking and cropping that should be made based on the farm system and, whisper this – food production, are made to shoehorn as many paying options into land as possible.
There’s an added risk that a scheme paraded as largely DIY becomes impossible to navigate without paying for someone else’s advice and time is unrewarding unless either done at large scale or by effectively not farming, and fails to replace support for marginal farming areas.
Meanwhile CS will run entirely online this year on a separate platform to BPS.
Not quite the delivery of a single scheme using BPS I’ve been advocating, so let’s hope the two talk to each other and the inevitable glitches with the CS platform get ironed out quickly.
Online mapping, like we had in stewardship 10 years ago? No sign of that.