Agriculture
Sectors
Farming income has moved from a payment that arrived automatically to payments that must be applied for, mapped, declared annually and evidenced for years afterwards. The work did not get smaller. It moved into the farm office.
The state of the industry
The money is still there. It just has to be claimed and proved now.
The direct payment has effectively gone. Delinked payments, which replaced the Basic Payment Scheme, are cut by ninety-eight per cent on the first thirty thousand pounds of reference amount for 2026 and by a hundred per cent above it, giving a maximum payment of six hundred pounds against seven thousand two hundred a year earlier. 2027 is the final year. Defra forecasts average farm business income on cereal farms falling by two thirds, to seventeen thousand pounds.
What replaced it has to be earned twice: once in the field and once on paper. Average farm income from agri-environment schemes rose from five thousand three hundred pounds in 2020 to twenty-one thousand one hundred in 2024. On the average English farm in 2024 to 2025, public payments made up around half of farm business income while agriculture itself contributed roughly a fifth. On cereal farms the delinked payment and agri-environment income together came to about ninety per cent of the total. The money is now in the paperwork, and the paperwork has an application, a map, an annual declaration and a seven-year evidence file behind it.
Defra put a price on that work and then withdrew it. The Sustainable Farming Incentive management payment was introduced in January 2023 explicitly because, in the department’s own words, the payments did not fully account for the cost of entering and implementing an agreement. It paid up to a thousand pounds a year, then up to two thousand. It has been removed for SFI26 agreements. The seven-year retention and the annual declaration have not.
The windows now close in days. Capital Grants 2026 opened at half past twelve on 30 July 2026; Defra reported a quarter of the budget allocated that day, half the next, and three quarters by 1 August. The Sustainable Farming Incentive reopened on 30 June 2026 after closing without notice in March 2025, and three quarters of the first window was allocated within a fortnight. Being ready before a window opens is no longer good practice, it is the whole of it.
Underneath the schemes sit the clocks, and the tightest is measured in hours. Holding register entries for cattle, sheep and pigs are due within thirty-six hours. Cattle movements go to BCMS within three days, deaths within seven, calf births within twenty-seven or the animal loses its food-chain eligibility. Veterinary medicine administration is recorded at the time and kept five years, pesticide applications three, nitrate vulnerable zone records five, and the cattle register ten.
And it is checked. The Environment Agency carried out four thousand four hundred and ten farm inspections in 2025 to 2026, against a target of four thousand, and recorded forty-three per cent non-compliance in that year. Inspection funding is committed to double between 2026 and 2029. Meanwhile, since 6 April 2026, sole traders and landlords over the fifty thousand pound threshold have kept digital records and filed quarterly under Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, with the first quarterly deadline falling on 7 August 2026.
The provenance
Farming is one of the family businesses.
The Hallaçi family businesses in the Balkans run across logistics, construction and agriculture. It is not English farming, and we would not pretend otherwise. What carries across is that the season does not wait for the paperwork, and the paperwork still has to be right.
The work
- Scheme applications and declarations. Land parcels, areas and covers checked and corrected before a window opens, applications prepared, and the annual declaration filed inside the two months it is due in.
- The evidence file. Field operations, invoices and records assembled as the year runs rather than reconstructed for an inspection, and retained to the seven years an agreement requires.
- Livestock movement reporting. Holding registers kept to the thirty-six hour rule, movements and deaths reported to BCMS and the Livestock Information Service, inventories returned in December.
- Medicine and spray records. Administration recorded at the time with batch, quantity and withdrawal period, applications logged with product, dose, area and crop, both held to their statutory retention.
- Nutrient and soil records. Field and manure records updated weekly, the annual livestock manure record closed off by the end of April, and soil test dates tracked so no plan runs on results more than five years old.
- Assurance and inspection preparation. Audit packs assembled ahead of a visit, actions from the last one closed and evidenced, and correspondence with merchants, vets and agronomists kept moving.
The software stays yours
Rural Payments, your farm management software, your movement reporting and your accounting package stay exactly as they are, and our people work inside them on accounts you issue. Which systems, and which parts of them, is settled in the engagement.
What changes for your team
The person who should be farming stops spending the evening on the RPA portal. Applications go in on the day a window opens rather than the week after it fills, the register is current rather than caught up on Sunday, and an inspection finds the file already built.
The economics
Set out in the assessment, seat by seat, where they can be given context.