The Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), part of the government's post-Brexit system of payments rewarding nature-friendly farming practices, was relaunched this year after an overhaul which included a £100,000 cap for individual businesses.

The first application window for SFI26 opened on June 30, prioritising small farms of between 3ha and 50ha, and farms without an existing ELM revenue agreement.

Three days later, Defra confirmed that around 50pc of the £60m “Window 1” budget had already been allocated following a surge of applications - which had seen 25pc of the available money secured in the first 24 hours alone.

A Defra blog post published on July 3........

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