Grasslands: Environment Protection

(asked on 7th December 2023) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what support his Department provides to (a) farmers and (b) land managers to protect grasslands.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 14th December 2023

There are a wide range of grassland offers available for both farmers and land managers within our current Sustainable Farming Incentive and Countryside Stewardship offers. Grants available cover all types of grassland from agriculturally productive grasslands to priority habitat grasslands, such as support for actions for the protection and management of species rich grassland and wet grassland for waders and wildfowl. In addition, we are looking at introducing a number of new actions to help protect grassland including managing floodplain meadows.

As of April 2023, there were a total of 755,640 hectares of grassland managed and enhanced in both Countryside Stewardship and Environmental Stewardship schemes.

In January 2023, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published an “Environmental Land Management update: how government will pay for land-based environment and climate goods and services”. This publication sets out all the activities we’ll pay farmers and land managers to carry out from 2024, to improve the environment alongside food production. We will publish further details on the 2024 offer shortly.

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