Free advice and support until 2025
The Farm for the Future programme is designed to provide information, support and guidance for farmers to navigate their way through the Agricultural Transition; due to changing policy, reduction and ultimate loss of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) and the emergence of new Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes.
The programme is funded by Defra’s Future Farming Resilience Fund, and any tenant or owner-occupied farm currently in receipt of BPS in England is eligible to join for free. The Hill Farm Project is working with the Royal Countryside Fund as one of 19 delivery partners across the country who can build on their existing relationships within their farming communities, to tailor activity to local needs. This ensures that the most important issues receive the right focus and are delivered via known and trusted people.
We ran a successful pilot in 2021/22 which led to the current 3 year roll out, delivering a main programme of events each autumn/winter. This free programme offers the chance to join meetings or events which highlight and address some of the main concerns brought about by the changes in policy from the Agricultural Transition. As this has been through continual change, its understandable that farmers may be unclear about their options.
Our programme on Dartmoor is designed to help with this; to understand the implications to the farm business from declining BPS payments, how to identify and compare potential income from new Countryside Stewardship (CS) and Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) schemes, what's involved and how to approach these? We start with these core subjects, expanding into optional topic workshops as we progress each year.
Now with three seasons under our belts and having worked with over 150 Dartmoor farms so far through this programme, we are currently (Spring 2024) paused as most of our farmers are busy with lambing and calving. We have also designed our wider events offer to be complementary and run in parallel, all of which are designed to provide insight, build knowledge and an opportunity to see or discuss practicalities first-hand.
We are in the process of developing the programme for the coming months, which will start towards the end of the summer, to reflect the planned release of information from Defra with the full details around the Combined CS/SFI offer. This should give us the full picture of offers, payment rates, what can be stacked to optimise opportunities (eg. the expectation to combine stone faced earth banks & woody hedgerows), and how to apply via the new single platform.
Any farmer in receipt of BPS may continue to register their interest with us for the next season, going forwards until March 2025. We also regularly issue updates to those involved to reflect ongoing scheme releases from Defra, to highlight the important points, saving you from having to read every single news release.
Participants are offered the option of a free one to one consultation, which covers a half day of Consultant time provided by the programme. This is currently a one-off option during the three years.
You can sign up with us at any time - submit your interest either on the Royal Countryside Fund page or with us through all the usual contact links or via our subscription form.
