Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment she has made of the impact on small farms of the Sustainable Farming Incentive application window opening after the previous scheme has closed.

To date small farms have been less likely to be in SFI.

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. This will make a major contribution to Defra’s EIP target to double the number of farms providing for farm wildlife by December 2030 (compared with 2025).

Window 2 will open from September 2026 for all farms.