The UK government’s decision to abruptly close all applications for its flagship nature-friendly farming scheme has shocked many of the country’s farmers and environmentalists.
The sustainable farming incentive (SFI) is one of a series of schemes which pays farmers in England to nurture the soil and wildlife and improve water quality. It is far from perfect.
People have criticised its complexity and lack of clarity, its financial viability or its impact on how farms operate and how this would change the balance between producing food and reaching environmental goals.
It’s too early to tell if these critics were correct, but the SFI certainly provided some stability for British farmers after EU farm subsidies ended post-Brexit. It seemed poised to make some positive impact.
The government says a revised version will be announced in the coming months, but it will be hard to regain the trust of farmers. The decision to close the scheme for now throws a stark light on a broader issue: the tendency to prioritise immediate financial needs over the long-term health of both the farming sector and the environment.
This is a classic example of what economists call “future discounting”, and it’s a dangerous game to play when it comes to vital services.
Essentially, future discounting means we value things more in the present than we do in the future. If you are promised £100 today, or £110 in two months, which would you take? Sometimes there’s no right or wrong answer – do what you think is right for you with that £100. But sometimes… well, sometimes there is a right answer.
The value of now, the value of the future
The SFI scheme offers vital support for sustainable practices that, while crucial, often require upfront investment. This includes cover cropping, for example, where a crop is grown simply to cover a field rather than to be harvested.
Cover cropping can help rejuvenate soils and is good for insects, but there are costs attached to purchasing the seeds, sowing them, and missing out on income by not growing a commodity crop.
Other investment examples might involve creating grassland or ponds and ditches to hold back rainwater and prevent floods. These things have an immediate impact on farm output and activities, but with an eye to longer-term benefit.
The sudden closure of the scheme creates an immediate financial vacuum for those who missed the (unannounced) window. Thankfully, farmers with existing agreements will continue within the scheme, and applications that had been submitted prior to the sudden closure will still be assessed.
However, even for those who are currently enrolled, this about-face instils fear that support will be withdrawn in the years to come – long before something like an expanded woodland has come to fruition.
The government says that it has run out of money for the current budget cycle. Rather than celebrating the fact that so many farmers want to be involved, want to do adopt better farming practices and act as custodians of nature, it instead panicked and shut people out.
Too much demand for a nature-friendly future, not enough cold hard cash. And now we can see how the discounting works – the perceived urgency of cashflow today overshadows the long-term benefits of healthy soil, thriving biodiversity, and a resilient ecosystem.
There are specific actions that SFIs are meant to support, including soil health, water quality, biodiversity and pest management. Each of these requires investment to manage, and to rectify when things go wrong (see the huge fines for water companies).
For example, it is easier to address issues of water quality by supporting better land use – reduced agri-chemicals, more grassland, tree cover, and so on – than to treat poor water quality downstream.
But farmers operate both within tight financial margins and on long time-scales. They need security of income to plan land use, including whether they can afford to implement alternative strategies. But they do want to. That’s why there’s been so much demand for SFIs.
A false economy
Sympathy could be rustled up for the government, trying to manage complex budgets in a complicated time. But it has made one misstep after another in relation to both food and farming (farmer protests over inheritance tax, for instance) and the environment (such as the planned Heathrow airport expansion)).
So while immediate fiscal prudence is important, ignoring the long-term consequences of environmental degradation is a false economy. We have a responsibility to value the future as much as the present. Failing to do so will have serious consequences for our environment, our food security, and the well-being of future generations.
Rather than discounting futures, we should be doing the opposite – negative futures discounting. It sounds upside-down, but it boils down to this: we should value the future more, not less.
In particular, we should be focused on nurturing good farming and environmental protection. These should take centre stage as mission critical things that we need, and not just for now, but always.
The sustainable farming incentive shutdown is another chance to reflect on the fact that farming and environmental sustainability are not luxuries, but necessities. We cannot afford to continually discount the future, sacrificing the future of farming and the environment for the sake of short-term finance. It’s time to re-evaluate our priorities.
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Emma Burnett has previously received funding from sankalpa. She also works as a sustainability researcher for a whisky company.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
