Sustainable Farming Initiative

When we were in the EU farmers got subsidies via the Common Agricultural Policy. On leaving, the UK government have come up with their own scheme to enable public money to be used for public good. It is called the Sustainable farming Initiative (SFI). The idea is that farmers will be given subsidies not based on the the amount of land they farm but on what they do for the environment. 

This could be small projects for Nature recovery scheme (NRS) such as planting trees and make areas for wildlife such as pollination patches. 

It could also be large scale projects such as restoring peatland under the Landscape recovery Scheme (LRS).

The idea is that farmers will be responsible for enable the land to contribute towards the 2050 UK net zero targets.

A good start but it is bit short on detail and there is a danger that land use for carbon sequestration could be double counted i.e someone pays for trees to be planted to offset their carbon and the land owner applies for NRS money to do this and this counts towards their carbon emissions and then the government counts that towards the UK net zero targets!!