Defra has announced that there will be 2 SFI application windows in 2026:
June – for small farms and farmers without existing environmental land management agreements
September – All farmers
To make the new SFI offer simpler and more focused, we are streamlining it by reducing the number of actions. There will still be a broad offer to suit different types of farms and plenty of choice, with greater emphasis on actions that support sustainable food production. This will include:
- limiting how much land can be put into actions that take land out of production. Previously, there were 10 ‘limited area’ actions in SFI. We are exploring whether more actions should be limited to a small proportion of the farm so they work alongside food production
- reviewing payment rates for actions that take land out of production where uptake has been particularly high.
Read more on this Defra blog post.