Farming Roadmap 2050

The government's 25-year roadmap puts soil, habitat and farm wildlife at the heart of food production. We'd urge every land manager to read carefully how it intends to pay for all this, because the smart money may be on acting now.

Yesterday (24th June), Defra published Farming Roadmap 2050: Growing England's Future, alongside its response to Baroness Batters' Farming Profitability Review.

For those of us who have spent our careers arguing that productive farming and a recovering countryside are inseparable, it is welcome to see how much of that thinking the roadmap takes as read. Managing food, soil and wildlife as one system has long been cast as the alternative way to farm - admirable and Groundswell-worthy, perhaps, but niche. The roadmap speels it out as the official plan.

Food and nature were never the trade-off

This debate has been framed as a tug-of-war: food production on one side, nature on the other. The roadmap is clear that the most resilient farms will be profitable because they work with the environment, and that lower-input, nature-friendly systems can maintain or even lift output while cutting exposure to volatile fertiliser and fuel costs.

Some 69% of England's farmland (6.1 million hectares) is in agri-environment agreements, and around 50,000 businesses are in an ELM scheme. But we already were at around 70% of farms in agri-environment agreements a decade ago. The roadmap reads, in places, like a description of what our most forward-thinking customers have been doing for years: building soil, integrating habitat and treating biodiversity as part of the farm's infrastructure rather than a cost centre.

The 2030 farm-wildlife target

The target to double the number of farms providing sufficient year-round resources for farm wildlife by December 2030, compared with 2025 (2025 Environmental Improvement Plan Commitment 16) is to be delivered in its entirety by SFI and Higher Tier.

The resources are food, shelter and breeding habitat provided across every season for the whole farmland wildlife community - pollinators such as bees, hoverflies and butterflies, other invertebrates, mammals and birds. In practice, that means a continuous succession of pollen and nectar through spring and summer, insect-rich habitat, seed-rich food through the winter hungry gap, and safe nesting, breeding and overwintering cover.

Defra's baseline is that around 21% of farm businesses were already counting towards this target in 2025, with qualifying wildlife action on at least 7% of their land. Doubling that means reaching roughly 42% and up to one in every two farms.

Number of farmers whose agri-environment agreements end in the 2026/27 financial year has been put at around 27,800. The SFI26 September window will need to do a lot of heavy lifting just to stand still, before a single farm is added towards the doubling target.

Soil and cover crops move to centre stage

The same logic runs through the soil commitments: 60% of England's agricultural soil into sustainable management by 2030, with SFI explicitly rewarding herbal leys, cover crops and catch and companion cropping to build organic matter, hold water and cut reliance on bought-in inputs. Cover, diversity and living roots are no longer a nice-to-have, they are the policy.

The small print

The roadmap quietly rewrites how environmental work gets paid for: good practice is moving from something the government pays for towards something farmers are expected to do.

The overall farm budget for England, at around £2.4bn, is broadly flat in cash terms and materially smaller in real terms when you account for inflation and against input costs the OBR expects to run around 30% higher in 2026 than in 2020. It’s certainly nowhere near the £4bn many estimate is required to meet our environmental targets.

Scheme options will be divided into three categories:

1. Payments that mitigate harm (e.g. buffer strips to stop nutrients reaching watercourses) will be time-limited and phased out as they are absorbed into regulation;

2. Payments for conversion actions, the ones that shift a system onto a more sustainable footing, will also be time-limited as they become standard practice and supply-chain requirements; and

3. Genuine public goods, such as creating and maintaining habitat on land taken out of production, are expected to attract enduring public funding beyond 2030.

On top of that, the move to spatial targeting of some SFI and Higher Tier payments from 2027 is intended to send money to the places where it does most good rather than to everyone everywhere. Hopefully, this won't exclude high quality habitats simply on the basis of the familiar "computer says no."

There is also a clear expectation that private finance, nature markets and Biodiversity Net Gain (extended to major infrastructure projects from November 2026) will increasingly carry the load.

What now?

The window to be paid for getting ahead of the curve is open now with SFI26, Higher Tier and other schemes (e.g. capital grants, FiPL, etc.), and it will not stay open indefinitely. Get well-designed habitat, cover and soil systems into the ground while the funding is there and before the regulator catches up.

At Oakbank, we are farmers too and we design for outcomes including real nesting cover, real pollen and nectar, real winter seed, real nutrient capture and return for the following cash crop, not for box-ticking. Farming business need to value results, not minimum effort. We are here to help and provide practical advice – please give us a call.