The Sustainable Farming Incentive – the first element of the government’s new Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme – will be available from 30 June, Defra secretary George Eustice confirmed in his speech at Groundswell event.

SFI is intended to "financially reward" projects undetaken by farmers that will benefit the environment. The initial module will concentrate on soils.

There are 3 standards available in the Sustainable Farming Incentive with different levels and payments:

• arable and horticultural soils
• improved grassland soils
• moorland

The total annual payment you receive depends on the number of hectares (ha) of eligible land you enter into each level - click the links above for more information and payment levels.

Mr Eustice said: "We’re about to launch the Sustainable Farming Incentive in a few days’ time, on 30 June, and we are trying really hard to make sure that we keep those principles of simplicity and that space for things to be done differently.

"There is no application window. There’s no deadline. You can enrol any time you like. It opens next week, but if you’re too busy at the moment, and you’d rather wait until August, do it then. If that’s still too busy and you want to wait until the winter, you can join then, you can join any time of the year. And it’s a rolling window, it never closes.

"When you join you can expect your first payment in three months, and then you’ll get a regular quarterly payment thereafter. No more racing to get forms in in time for a deadline. No more fretting that the cheque hasn’t arrived on a particular date. A regular cash flow coming in to reflect those costs.

"We’ve tried to make it far less prescriptive than the old schemes we had before. So we’re not being prescriptive about what type of green cover crop you can use. I always remember visiting a Natural England field officer involved with the Countryside Stewardship schemes. He said in their landscape the flower mix that works for field boundaries on those chalky soils in Sussex actually wasn’t prescribed centrally. And he says that the view was that it was so much effort to try to get permission to vary from the national rules that have been set down to abide by EU law, so prescriptive, that it was better just to say it’s more trouble than it’s worth, let’s not bother.

"What we have got to do in all these new schemes is to keep that flexibility.

"Now we’ve started with soil, because soil is absolutely at the heart of successful profitable farming. And it is also, if we get things right, the first part of our ecosystem that will start to recover. So I have farmers who’ve adopted min-till or no-till systems, they find that within just three years the earthworm population can as much as triple. We know that the soil reacts quickly and we know that soil is absolutely central to successful farm production. That is why it’s where we’re starting with the first module of the SFI. But it is only the first module.

"Next year, we are planning additional modules on nutrients which will build on the work we’re doing on soils and help farmers deal with the cost of synthetically manufactured fertilisers at the moment. There will be a standard on hedgerows, because hedgerows are probably the single most important ecological building block in our farm landscape, and managed well they can be a space in which nature can recover."