22/09/2026
GET ME ANDY BURNHAM ON THE PHONE NOW!
Today’s SFI launch was an absolute disgrace.
This is no way to run agricultural support.
Farm businesses cannot be expected to plan their futures around a system that operates like trying to get Oasis tickets. We are talking about applications worth up to £100,000 per business. For some farms, in the current climate, this money is genuinely make or break.
My clients and I have spent hours putting schemes together properly. Meetings, maps, calculations, checking eligibility and designing options that work for the farm while actually delivering something worthwhile for wildlife and the environment.
And then today arrived.
The system didn’t work properly!
Options that should have been compatible were being flagged as incompatible. Options couldn’t be selected on land where they should have been available. Carefully prepared applications suddenly couldn’t be entered as planned.
I rang the RPA at 11:05am trying to get answers. They called me back at 4:05pm. By then the budget had been gone for around 15 minutes.
I am supposed to be acting as a professional adviser, yet today there was no time to properly check what was being submitted because support funding was ticking down by the minute.
That is completely unacceptable!
We did everything we were supposed to do. We prepared. We planned. We checked the rules. We spent hours getting everything lined up. And in the end, none of that mattered as much as whether DEFRA’s computer system worked and in lots of cases it didn’t!
Can you imagine any other form of government support being run like this? Imagine telling everyone receiving benefits that once a year they all have to log on at the same time, race through an application, and when the money runs out everyone else gets nothing for another year.
The stress placed on farmers and agents today has been appalling.
This is not agricultural policy. Today has made DEFRA look completely incompetent, and it needs sorting out!
