Our response to Welsh Government's launch of the Sustainable Farming Scheme

Published: 22 July 2025

The long-awaited scheme is intended to use hundreds of millions of pounds each year to help Welsh farmers transition to a sustainable future, where they produce food alongside tackling the climate and nature emergency. RSPB Cymru welcomes this approach as past farming policies and payments haven’t adequately supported or invested in farming that balances food production and nature, resulting in our biodiversity and natural resources being much depleted in extent and condition.

We should all be concerned by the current state of nature in Wales. Not only does nature have the inherent right to thrive, it provides us with a multitude of essential environmental benefits, including the air we breathe and the water we drink. Climate change and nature loss are also the biggest threats to domestic food production. A scheme that uses public money to invest in farming, and that takes a joined-up approach to addressing these challenges, is an extremely good use of public money and an absolute must for the resilience of agriculture and the well-being of our and future generations.

While the recent launch of the SFS represents an important step in the right direction and will help farmers transition towards sustainable land management, it alone will not be enough to halt – let alone reverse – the decline in nature, or to respond to the increasing impacts of climate change. To truly support farmers across Wales to restore nature, which includes giving common species a boost to increase their abundance, managing our most important wildlife sites (including SSSIs), and saving our most threatened wildlife, the scheme must go further.

It’s now vital that the Welsh Government works closely with rural stakeholders to develop and implement the rest of the SFS as a matter of urgency (before the end of 2026) and to ensure the scheme is an effective means of promoting Welsh farming’s transition to a sustainable future. For nature this means:

1. Setting out a clear plan detailing how the SFS will contribute to meeting Wales’s 2030 biodiversity targets, including managing our most important places for nature, including SSSIs, and saving threatened species. The National Audit Office has identified the lack of such a plan for the equivalent English scheme, as a significant flaw resulting in the poor use of public money.

2. Allocating sufficient long-term funding to invest in farming that delivers nature restoration alongside sustainable food production. Independent analysis finds that Wales must invest £594 million per annum to fully fund Welsh farmers in tackling the nature and climate crisis, and to provide a sustainable future for food production. This is approximately twice the existing rural budget and highlights the need to accelerate work to blend green finance with public funding.

3. Ensuring the scheme is effective at promoting targeted actions, in the right places, coordinated across farms to achieve the right scale and connectivity to benefit nature. A recent report into the effectiveness of Glastir concludes this approach is critical if environmental outcomes are to be an objective of future schemes. The report also states actions must be of sufficient magnitude at a local level to restore or to protect nature and taken up at a sufficient scale to have impact at a national scale.

4. The provision of expert advice and guidance, ensuring farmers have access to qualified support for sustainable land management that balances food production with nature recovery. This includes farmer to farmer knowledge exchange. 

The Welsh food and farming sector is set to become Wales’ largest domestic emitter of greenhouse gases by the mid 2030’s. The 10% woodland cover requirement, which was intended to support farming to help meet climate targets, was dropped in 2024. But it’s essential that the Welsh Government works with stakeholders to establish how the scheme will ensure farming makes the required and fair contribution to addressing climate change challenges. 

The SFS provides Wales with a unique opportunity to establish a fair and equitable scheme that invests public money in sustainable farming and land management to address some of the biggest challenges we all face. For this reason, we also call on Welsh Government to commit to ongoing review of the effectiveness of all aspects of the scheme from its launch and to make changes to scheme requirements and financial incentives as necessary to secure value for money and the scheme’s outcomes and objectives.