Grants & Environmental Schemes
The right environmental scheme can secure your farm’s income for years, and the wrong one can cost just as long to unwind.
We help landowners work out which grants and environmental schemes genuinely fit their land, and which do not.
Advice tailored to your land, not a generic scheme overview
Environmental Land Management (ELM) has replaced the old Basic Payment Scheme, rewarding landowners for the public goods their land delivers: healthy soils, cleaner water, thriving wildlife and greater resilience to a changing climate. The Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship, Landscape Recovery, Farming in Protected Landscapes and Capital Grants each reward different actions. They also run on different timescales and ask for different levels of commitment. The right combination depends on the specifics of your land, your existing agreements and what you want the business to look like in five or ten years.
As part of our wider Rural Consultancy service, we help landowners across Kent, Sussex and Surrey work through those choices with a clear view of how they sit alongside succession and tax planning, not in isolation from them.
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Grants are not the only opportunity
If your land qualifies for grant funding, it may also have value through Biodiversity Net Gain, carbon markets or Environmental, Social and Governance units, income streams that can often sit alongside your existing scheme rather than replace it.
Please contact a member of our Rural Consultancy Team to discuss how we can help you.
Offices in Battle, Haywards Heath, Pulborough, Surrey Hills and Tunbridge Wells.
Grants & Environmental Schemes Insight & Opinions
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DEFRA Announcement: SFI 2026
Following yesterday’s updates from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), we now…
Common questions about grants and environmental schemes
Sustainable Farming Incentive rewards ongoing, farm-level actions like soil health and integrated pest management, and is generally more flexible and easier to enter. Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier targets specific, higher-value environmental outcomes such as species-rich grassland or habitat restoration, and involves a more detailed, tailored agreement. Many farms benefit from a combination of both rather than choosing one over the other.
In many cases, yes. Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship and Capital Grants can often run alongside each other on the same holding, provided the actions do not overlap on the same land parcel. Getting this combination right is exactly the kind of advice that pays for itself, since the wrong overlap can mean losing funding you would otherwise be entitled to.
Farming in Protected Landscapes (FiPL) is a grant programme for farmers and land managers within National Landscapes and National Parks, including the High Weald, South Downs, Surrey Hills and Kent Downs. It funds projects supporting nature recovery, climate resilience, public access and cultural heritage, and is administered locally by each protected landscape team rather than centrally by Defra.
Review your options well before the agreement expires, ideally a full season ahead. Many farms simply renew into whatever is easiest, but a scheme review at renewal is often the best opportunity to reassess whether your current combination of schemes still fits how the farm is run today.
It is possible to apply directly, but scheme rules, eligibility criteria and payment rates change frequently, and poorly matched applications can mean missed funding or actions that do not suit the land. Professional advice is particularly valuable where you are combining multiple schemes, managing a large or varied holding, or coming to the end of an existing agreement.
This varies significantly depending on your land, the schemes you are eligible for and how many actions you combine, so it is not something we would put a generic figure on here. Talk to our rural team for an assessment based on your specific holding.