Following the closure of the second application window for the Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 (SFI26) only hours after it opened, North Herefordshire MP Dr Ellie Chowns has written to Farming Minister Stephen Morgan calling for urgent action to better support farmers seeking to move to more sustainable farming practices. 

In her letter, Ellie raised the cases of several constituents who wrote to her after encountering issues with the application process and have been left without funding following its swift closure – and pointing out that "the speed at which the funding was taken up suggests that the problem is not a lack of willingness among farmers to deliver environmental outcomes, but a lack of sufficient, reliable public investment to enable them to do so."  

Ellie has called on the government to: 

• Provide a remedy for farmers who made genuine and timely attempts to apply but were unable to secure an agreement – particularly those whose existing environmental agreements are expiring before the next SFI opportunity.  

• Review cases involving technical or administrative problems, including farmers who followed Rural Payments Agency advice to withdraw, reject, or reapply – and ensure that farmers who lost access to funding because of such problems have a route to redress.   

• Publish a clear account of Window 2, including the number of applications received, the number of agreements that will be funded, the number of eligible farmers left without support, and when the budget became fully committed.  

• Set out what support is available to farmers with expiring agreements who have been left without a new agreement – rather than simply asking them to wait for SFI27.  

• Use the evidence from SFI26 to set a significantly more ambitious level of funding for future environmental farming support and set out how the government will ensure that farmers who want to improve soil, protect nature and rivers, build resilience, and produce food sustainably have the resources to do so.  

Ellie said: "The message coming from farmers about this could not be clearer: there is huge demand to adopt farming practices that protect our soil, rivers, wildlife, and the long-term resilience of our farms. 

"But farmers cannot deliver these changes alone. They need proper, reliable support from the government – something evidently not present at the moment, given how many farmers have been left without the funding they need after the entirety of the money committed for SFI26 was fully allocated within hours. 

"The government needs to recognise the scale of ambition among our farmers – and the urgency of climate breakdown – and properly invest in our farmers and our land. Farmers should not be put in the position of having to race against the clock for funding that is essential to making sustainable farming work. 

"I will keep pushing the government to make sure farmers who want to transition to sustainable farming methods have the support they need, and that public investment is ambitious enough to match the scale of the job we are asking them to do."