This month’s SFI application process has further let down our farmers across Dorset and the wider country, who are already dealing with some of the worst harvest yields in modern memory and a Labour government that has heaped huge levels of uncertainty and anxiety on them with their inheritance tax raid.
The SFI, a £253m government grant scheme that forms part of a package of payments that replaced the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy post-Brexit, is intended to support farmers to farm in ways that improve nature, soil quality and biodiversity. For many farmers, particularly in the more marginal farming areas of Dorset, the SFI and other grants can be the difference between surviving and not. The entire £253 million SFI budget allocated for England ran out in less than six hours after a delayed and chaotic opening, with applications being allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Many farms across Dorset will have missed out on the SFI scheme, and our Labour MPs in the county must explain to farmers why the scheme opened and closed so quickly, with so many farmers left out of pocket, and what assistance they plan to offer those who missed out. More broadly, our farmers need more support; farming has become an extremely marginal business, with many smaller farms actually unprofitable.
To contextualise just how minimal the support for farmers actually is, the total Farming and Countryside Programme budget per annum is £2.3bn; that is just over two months’ equivalent of the Universal Credit payments to households containing at least one foreign national, £12 billion total, £7.7 billion (65%) of which went to households in which at least one person was recorded as not in work.
Farming is an indivisible part of our Dorset culture and identity; our farmers deserve more support, and if we want to encourage farmers, as many wish to do anyway, to farm with nature and the environment in mind, we need increased funding to support and remunerate them. Longer term, ending the appalling price pressure that supermarkets leverage over farmers must be a priority for a Reform Government, or we look at ways of giving farmers direct access to their end consumer, at collective scale, so they can benefit from better margins, something we are consulting on currently across the Dorset Council area.
Reform’s message to farmers is the same as the rest of the country: better times are ahead.
Thomas Gargrave for Reform UK
