How the Government got the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme wrong again - Sarah Todd

As hosts of the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Chris Tarrant and latterly Jeremy Clarkson have made a catchphrase of the line “fastest finger first” as contestants scramble under the studio lights to win the chance to step up to the hot seat.

Thousands of farmers missed out on vital government funding last week after a similar stressful kerfuffle that others have compared to the online race to secure Glastonbury or Oasis tickets. Only thing is, this was playing pantomime with rural people’s livelihoods.

There was a pot of £233m funding available for the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) funding that opened at 10am but had run dry by 3.48pm.

Nobody knew precisely when the window would open - there was talk of some farm business consultants and land agents taking it in turns to keep watch in case applications suddenly started to be accepted overnight - to help farmers claim cash incentives for turning over swathes of their land to nature-friendly schemes such as planting hedges, creating wildflower margins and replenishing the soil.

The National Farmers' Union (NFU) is calling for the government to explain why the scheme opened and closed so quickly, with so many farm bank balances not now getting the top up they had hoped for, despite repeated warnings of the budget not being big enough.

The organisation is correct but the general public, the taxpayer, would surely like to think that financial help was going to small and medium-sized family farms first. The ones they supported when the tractors trundled down to London to protest against the family farm tax. Not necessarily those that own thousands of acres and have an agent’s services secured to sit in front of a computer screen and do the application for them.

There have been so many stories of farmers who were outside tending their animals - as any bona fide son of the soil should be at 10am - who then maybe looked at their mobile phones when they came in for something to eat at lunchtime. Then, shock horror (but not to those who live with rubbish rural broadband) they just couldn’t get connected to the application system.

This is playing Russian roulette with people’s livelihoods and highlights the importance of what real clarty-wellied farmers have always wanted; to be paid a fair price in a fair marketplace for the livestock or crops they produce and not be at the beck and call of some scheme or other. Good farmers, with a bit of cash in their pockets for a field of corn or pen of lambs well sold, have always reinvested in the land. Some hedging here or repairing a stone wall there. Generations and generations have planted trees whose shade they will never sit under. Centuries before the word subsidy was heard of. It’s just good, old-fashioned farming as it should be.

Now we have a new breed of rural investors - those millionaires who did buy land as a tax loophole - who are wealthy and educated enough to be able to play the system. Instead of rooting them out, rural departments are run by lanyard-wearing lefties who have never stepped foot on a farm. Online form filled in? Boxes ticked?

Cumbrian sheep farmer James Rebanks, who has become well known because of his books documenting the loss of his farming family’s traditional way of life, used some farmyard expletives to describe the abrupt closure of this funding application window. His own farm missed out because they physically didn’t have time to navigate the online process.

Rebanks has warned that a decade of habitat regeneration will be undone as those who have missed out now need to up production and turn their backs on worrying about wildlife to try to balance the books.

The whole debacle reiterates the call the Countryside Alliance made at the beginning of this month for our political leaders to have a ‘rural reset’ of their relationship with countryside communities.

Of course, Tory politicians jumped on the alliance’s calls, conveniently forgetting that they took the countryside vote for granted.

Cheap foreign imports with questionable animal welfare standards, supermarket labelling and pricing policy were never tackled by the blue brigade.

Supporting a rural reset doesn’t mean saying what farming folk want to hear, putting on a checked shirt and arranging a photo call at a local livestock market. It involves a much wider root and branch review.

While we all (quite rightly) get our underwear in a twist about the benefits gravy train and the illegal migrants, there is real chaos in the countryside. Final answer.