Abby Allen has no problem with her neighbours peering over her luxuriant hedges to see what she is up to on her farm.
For years she has been carrying out ad hoc experiments with wildlife and farming techniques; in her lush Devon fields native cattle graze alongside 400-year-old hedgerows, with birds and butterflies enjoying the species-rich pasture.
Under the environmental land management scheme (ELMS), introduced by the government in 2021, those experiments were finally being funded. “We have a neighbour who has always been more of an intensive farmer,” she says, but he is now considering leaving fields unploughed to help the soil. “It genuinely is having such a huge impact in changing people’s mindsets who traditionally would never have thought about farming in this way.”
The new nature payments scheme followed the UK’s exit from the EU, when the government decided to scrap the common agricultural payments scheme, which gave a flat subsidy dependent on the number of acres a farmer managed. In its place came ELMS, which pays farmers for things such as planting hedges, sowing wildflowers for birds to feed on and leaving corners of their land wild for nature.
But these schemes are now at threat of defunding, as the Labour government has refused to commit to the £2.4bn a year spending pot put in place by the previous Conservative government. With spending tight and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, cutting back on infrastructure and hinting at tax rises, a cut to the ELMS scheme may be on her list.
However, government data released last week found the schemes were working to tentatively bring nature back to England’s farmland. Butterflies, bees and bats are among the wildlife being boosted by ELMS, with birds among the chief beneficiaries, particularly ones that largely feed on invertebrates. An average of 25% more breeding birds were found in areas utilising the eco-friendly schemes.
Initially, there was little enthusiasm or uptake from farmers for the schemes, which were thought of as underfunded and complicated to apply to. The former president of the National Farmers’ Union Minette Batters said she thought private finance should pay for landscape recovery schemes, and farmers should be incentivised to produce food rather than rewild their land. The new president, Tom Bradshaw, has signalled some support for the schemes but also believes they are underfunded.
But there are also farmers who welcome the schemes. Allen says the ELMS has helped her farm provide data and funds to expand and improve the good things they were doing for nature. “Some of the money available around things like soil testing and monitoring – instead of us going ‘we think these are the right things to do and providing these benefits,’ we can now measure it. The exciting thing now is there is money available to measure and monitor and kind of prove that you’re doing the right things. And so then you can find appropriate funding to do more of that.”
Allen, who is in the Nature Friendly Farming Network, manages a network of farms in England, most of which are using the ELMS. This includes chicken farms where the poultry spend their life outside rather than in sheds and other regenerative livestock businesses.
Without the funding, many would find it difficult to make as much space for nature. Allen says: “If you’ve been just funding it yourself and trying to do the right thing for all of these years, there’s been no acknowledgment of that for people that were very nature focused. Now they are supported to have permanent pasture, species-rich grassland; you’re now actually paid for that amazing asset. For the last 50 years, that just hasn’t been a thing.”
Mark Spencer was an environment minister until 2024 when he lost his seat, but now spends more time in the fields admiring the fruits of his and his family’s labour. He says that a few years of nature-friendly agriculture has restored lapwings and owls.
“On the farm, I haven’t seen lapwings in any number for what feels like a whole generation. You know, as a kid, when I was in my early teens, you’d see lapwings. We used to call them peewits. We’d see them all the time, and they sort of disappeared.
“But then, me and my neighbours changed the way we did cropping, left space in the fields for them to nest, and suddenly they returned. You need to have a piece of land where you’re not having mechanical machinery go over it on a regular basis, because otherwise you destroy the nest. We’ve also got baby owls in our owl box now for the first time in 15 years. They look mega, to be honest, these little owls, little balls of fluff. It is rewarding.”
Spencer was also intimately involved in creating the ELMS and is saddened that they may be cut back.
“By the time of the election, ELMS was already having massive impacts. Even farmers who were initially quite sceptical were signing up and taking the actions for nature. If we are just going to put that in jeopardy, we will undo all that progress we were just starting to see.”
Issues such as droughts, floods and inflation are squeezing farmers’ bottom lines and while restoring nature is “rewarding”, Spencer says that without a bit of financial help from the government, it may not be financially possible to leave land free for wildlife: “The issue is, there are so many struggles at the moment that if farmers were being penalised, as they were under the old system, for having hedges and trees on productive land, if they’re facing other issues, like extreme weather, inflation or that kind of thing, it’s not something that’s going to be possible to do. It’s one more thing that they’ve got to deal with. That’s what I fear.”
One of England’s best-known organic farmers is Guy Singh-Watson. You may think the Riverford veg box founder did not need any help or guidance to bring nature back to his Devon farm, but he has also found ELMS useful. With the actions he has taken under the sustainable farming incentive, he has seen a glut of hares bouncing in his artichoke plants.
“They’re pretty endangered in the south-west, and I’ve never seen so many – I mean, they are scurrying around your feet!” he says. “We’ve also had a massive increase in barn owls, kestrels, peregrine falcons here, loads of buzzards. By letting the hedges grow up and those little bits rewild, I think we really are seeing the wildlife come back to the farm. And that is supported by some of these schemes, which allow us financially to increase and improve what we are doing already.”
James Robinson runs a dairy farm in Strickley, Cumbria and has found nature payment schemes massively helpful, using the funds to restore hedgerows and help tree sparrows.
“The majority of farms have some sort of hedgerow,” he says. “A lot of the time they are managed, for ease of management, with a mechanical flail. So as you start changing that by either doing incremental cuttings, either every year, or you cut it four or five inches higher or wider each year, that really starts to benefit birdlife and mammals.”
Robinson has managed to boost bird life during the time he has farmed for nature: “We have 97 bird species at Strickley and I am particularly pleased with our tree sparrow population; they are threatened in the UK but have found a home in my hedges.”
