This Friday (28th Aug) will be the last day of SFI26 being open for small farms and those without existing agreements. We are then expecting SFI 26 to open to all farmers in September – but when? We have heard this will be in the third week of September but this hasn’t yet been confirmed by Defra. In the meantime, get everything ready – check you have parcel numbers for traditional buildings if you want to claim this payment, check the length of field boundaries if applying for hedges and walls and understand which options might be appropriate for each field parcel. You will only be able to have one SFI26 agreement per farm business (i.e. per SBI number) so you need to put everything into the one application.
If you have existing Stewardship or SFI agreements that expire before 1st March 2027, then you should apply to SFI26 on this land when the application period opens in September, rather than waiting until the end of your agreement. Defra says this should be possible even if your agreement is still live. If you wait until these agreements have ended, the scheme may have run out of funding. The budget for Window 2 has been increased to £180 million following Andy Burnham’s announcement last week but demand will be high given how long it has been since the scheme was last open. Find out more at SFI26: scheme information.
