Three weeks after the Sustainable Farming Incentive’s second application window spent its budget in an afternoon, the first SFI26 agreement offers are arriving on farm, with 1 November start dates. A conversation on The Farming Forum caught the moment, and the relief lasted about as long as it took the room to remember who never got through the door at all.
By TFF News | 18 October 2026 | Business
The conversation ran from 10 to 17 October in the forum’s Sustainable Farming Incentive section and drew 125 visible contributions, 2,623 views and 96 reactions, an average of 0.77 per contribution. The tone leaned critical: 62 negative contributions against 7 positive, with 56 neutral. These figures describe one conversation, not a representative survey of the sector.
Offers land with 1 November starts
A day after finding the offer message on the Defra site, the opening contributor reported: “Its signed sealed and delivered start date 1st nov now just got to get sown up making progress today . Seems strange that nobody else has said theve got it”. Others followed over the weekend, one confirming “Ours has come through for 1st Nov start date.”
The official numbers explain the lonely feeling. In a progress update published on 15 October, the Defra farming blog said around 2,500 agreement offers had been issued against roughly 12,200 Window 2 applications, with about 36% of those offers live, while Window 1 is nearly done: around 6,600 offers from about 6,700 applications, 95% started. As FarmingUK put it, close to 10,000 applicants are still waiting, and accepted technical-issue exception cases face more weeks of assessment.
An eligibility maze even the experienced disputed
What the offers mostly did was reopen the argument about who could get one. The sharpest version came early: “There’s a lot of people who have tried hard to get an agreement and haven’t been allowed to renewing existing agreement holders is just rubbing people’s noses in it”. The first acceptor conceded the point while refusing the blame: “We have as I see it to work with what weve got and theres very little if anything we can do about it”, he replied, agreeing it was hardly fair.
Experienced scheme holders disagreed about what the rules had actually been, until one contributor settled it: “Any ELMs scheme excluded that SBI from window 1 of SFI 26 for SBI over 50 hectares. Nothing to do with double funding.” That matches the published criteria: Window 1, which opened on 30 June with £60m, was for farms of 3 to 50 hectares, or larger farms with no existing Environmental Land Management revenue agreement. Everyone else waited for 22 September, or as the same contributor put it, “Was in the same Hunger Games saga as us all on 22 September”. The redesign suggestions wrote themselves, from monthly rolling admission as agreements expire, so there “wouldnt be such a mad scramble”, to the blunter “Any existing SBI without any SFI agreement, should be able to apply at any time. Period.”
Hill ground left outside
The conversation’s longest-running grievance came from the hills. One upland contributor, farming over 1,000 acres plus moorland, finally has an agreement: “Only just got my first sfi agreement a small one on 400 acres on window 2”. The rest of the farm sits outside the scheme, he said, behind designated sites on legacy stewardship agreements and common land the scheme cannot reach. His wider claim: “Out of 6100 sfi agreements in the north 40 were hill farm agreements. Gives you a bit idea what sort of thing we are all up against.” That figure is his account and the conversation did not verify it, but the common land problem is documented: the Foundation for Common Land reported in March that Defra and the RPA confirmed there is no mechanism for common land to enter SFI or Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier in 2026, leaving nearly 4,000 marginal farm businesses on legacy agreements or nothing. Opening both schemes to common land is now one of the NFU’s published asks.
Interest-free loans split the room
The second half of the conversation turned on the farms left without support. The trigger was the NFU’s proposal, set out by president Tom Bradshaw at the Labour Party Conference, for temporary, interest-free Keep Britain Growing Loans for the businesses hit hardest this summer, an ask aimed at the Chancellor ahead of the Budget rather than at the SFI pot, after a window Bradshaw said left farmers “high, dry and desperate”.
The room was not grateful. One SFI23 holder who missed the window himself was implacable: “I will never be on the side of govt loans to farmers. Look what’s happened with student loans!” Another asked the practical question: “If folk take a loan because they are short of cash and then no new SFI that is any good for them turns up how are they going to pay the loan back ?” The hill farmer defended the idea as triage: “It may not be ideal however it will play for time so people have an option to sort things out.”
Strikingly, the loan sceptic’s own arithmetic ended close to the official shortfall: “The long and short is govt is about £200m short”. The NFU’s published figures point the same way: more than £520m of expiring agreements against £310m across the two SFI26 windows, a £210m gap it wants explained.
Design lessons pile up for SFI27
The post-mortem came mostly from inside the scheme. On the uncapped early years, one contributor argued limits “Would have stopped the excesses with whole farms placed into Bird Cover. And widespread Herbal Leys on high input silage leys!” and concluded “The looseness of the prescriptions was at fault. And the subsequent reluctance politically to put the genie back in the bottle.” Another was unrepentant about taking the early terms: “Frankly anyone on marginal land who didn’t take the 2023 opportunity to mothball less productive land was foolish…” and drew the reply that will outlast the scheme: “least I will still have a working business when the 23 agreements come to an end.”
Where next is already in play. The NFU is pressing for the next SFI to open in early 2027 with agreements starting on 1 April, priority for farmers whose agreements are expiring, then regular windows, and Defra has confirmed it is exploring alternatives to first come, first served for 2027. One contributor, whose agreement runs to October 2027, spotted the trap in a rigid April start: “If not, I could fall into the trap of sudden death for current funding.”
The question the trade is left with
The offers going out are the first firm cash-flow signal since the window closed: several thousand businesses know they have three years of scheme income from 1 November, and close to 10,000 more should hear soon. But the conversation’s loudest voices belong to farms on the other side of the divide, and which side of that line a customer sits on may decide more autumn spending than any price list. The unresolved question is the one the conversation could not settle: when the next window opens, who goes first?
Read the source conversation and analysis
Read the full conversation on The Farming Forum here.
Agri Web Media’s nine-slide analysis of the conversation, with theme, sentiment and engagement charts, is available as a PDF: download the conversation analysis deck.
This conversation had been viewed 2,623 times on The Farming Forum when counted on 18 October 2026. Want your brand in the room when farmers talk business? Book advertising with Agri Web Media.