Farmers ‘have nothing to fear’ from the introduction of Countryside Stewardship but will face a fight to secure agri-environment agreements.
A more targeted approach which aims to principally deliver benefits to UK biodiversity and water quality will see fewer farmers in schemes compared to current levels of HLS and ELS membership.
Mike Rowe, Defra's deputy director of sustainable land and soils, said that there would be challenges ahead but the basic administration of the scheme would be similar to existing agreements.
He told farmers that a £3.1bn pot had been set aside to fund the new-look Countryside Stewardship programme and to service existing ELS or HLS schemes.
Mr Rowe said: “There’s nothing to fear in terms of the new scheme. It will look, feel and smell very much like its predecessor but the introduction of greening does present some complications.”
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Despite British farmers’ work for the environment being used as an example of best practice, regulatory controls have been ratcheted up to iron out errors and inconsistencies in administration across European member states.
“There are some challenges and I know they are causing anxiety and uncertainty in the farming community,” Mr Rowe added. “One of which is uniform start dates for agreements with pillar two, land-based payments being aligned to the Basic Payment Scheme.
“Despite having fought this for 10 years in Europe regrettably we’ve had to take our old and new schemes to align that.”
He warned that farmers would face competition for agreements.
“With ELS if you submitted an application and met the threshold you got an agreement. We don’t have the budgetary availability to guarantee that this time around. For the mid-tier scheme in particular it will be competitive and those farmers who put their options in the right place at the right scale will get a higher score that those who don’t.”
The whole of the UK has been mapped down to individual holding level to identify landscape features and the information will be used to ‘prompt’ farmers as to the stewardship options they should select.
Geoff Sansome from Natural England said the competitive nature of the application process and the budget available would inevitably lead to a drop in the number if agreements in place.
“It’s a difficult one to predict but I think we’re probably going to move from our peak of 50,000 agreements to somewhere near 30,000 agreements by 2020,” he said.
The application windows will run from July to September this year and agreements become live in January 2016.
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