Geospatial nudges for hypothetical Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) funding agreement

The British Government is committed to a broad range of ambitious environmental targets, set out in primary legislation. To meet these targets, the English landscape will need to be managed in certain specific ways. Agri-environment schemes (AES) are an important tool for encouraging farmers to adopt & continue management practices that encourage biodiversity, sequester carbon, & reduce pollution; the structure & content of these schemes in the UK was, until recently, subject to the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

Following the UK's exit from the EU, England was no longer subject to the CAP - creating the opportunity for major reforms to AES in England. A new suite of schemes - known collectively as Environmental Land Management (ELM) - have been designed for England, to help farmers & other land managers deliver our ambitious environmental targets.

ELM includes three schemes - the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Countryside Stewardship (CS) & Landscape Recovery (LR). While LR operates according to a collaborative bidding process, SFI & CS allow individual farmers & land managers to apply for funding & access technical guidance to support land management actions that deliver environmental outcomes. SFI covers actions that are easy to deliver & broadly applicable across a wide variety of farm types, with the aim of delivering mass uptake amongst most of the farming population. CS, by contrast, exists to fund more environmentally ambitious, technically specialised actions that need to be spatially targeted. Spatial targeting is a process which enables a system to indicate to customers which actions are likely to be particularly environmentally beneficial for a given piece of land. There are significant pressures to ensure that land is used for the optimum purpose - such as the balance between the desire to maintain food production at current levels, & to dramatically increase carbon storage & biodiversity - & so achieving optimum spatial targeting of high-value agri-environmental options on the land where they will deliver the greatest benefit is a key priority.

Currently, farmers access the expertise needed to site actions from a variety of sources: such as private or state-funded advice, or through reading technical guidance that is available on gov.uk. Advice is expensive - either for farmers or for the taxpayer - while written guidance is complicated, & time-consuming to read. The evaluation of live iterations of CS show that uptake of more ambitious options is low, with most farmers choosing less ambitious options that are more familiar, & therefore easier to incorporate into a business plan and carry out. Furthermore, farmers have provided significant amounts of negative feedback about the application process of CS - which involves scrolling through a long, unstructured list of hundreds of options, listed in order of publication - which they say is time-consuming, complicated, and confusing.