The Basic Payment Scheme required farmers to hold eligible land. The Sustainable Farming Incentive requires farmers to perform and evidence specific actions. That is a fundamental shift in what farm records are for and what farm software needs to produce. This article sets out exactly what DEFRA inspectors look for and what your software must be able to capture.
Under the Basic Payment Scheme, farmers received support payments based on land area. The record-keeping requirement was essentially about proving you held the land and that it was eligible. Most farmers could manage BPS compliance with a field register and a land agent.
ELMS — the umbrella framework covering the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), Countryside Stewardship (CS), and the Landscape Recovery scheme — works differently. Payments are made for specific actions: actions with environmental, soil health, or biodiversity objectives. To receive the payment, you must demonstrate that the action was actually performed, to the standard described, in the location declared. Demonstrating that requires evidence — and that evidence needs to be captured and retained in a way that holds up at inspection.
This is not a paperwork exercise. Inspectors are looking for evidence that the action had its intended effect on the ground. Generic crop records do not provide that. The evidence requirements for SFI and CS are action-specific and detailed.
The 2026 SFI offer is available in two application windows: June 2026 for small farms (up to 50 hectares) and farms without an existing ELM agreement, and September 2026 for all other farmers. Eligibility requires a minimum of 3 hectares of agricultural land registered on the Rural Payments service.
71 actions are available in the 2026 offer, down from the 2024 offer after 31 actions were removed due to low uptake or policy review. A new annual agreement cap of £100,000 has been introduced to broaden participation among smaller farms.
Land cover must be correctly recorded on Rural Payments before applying. For arable SFI actions, the relevant fields must show arable crops. For grassland actions, the appropriate grassland category must be recorded. Mismatches between what is declared on Rural Payments and what the inspector finds on the ground are one of the most common causes of payment reductions.
DEFRA checks SFI and Countryside Stewardship compliance through a combination of administrative checks, remote monitoring (satellite and aerial imagery), and physical field inspections. An inspector visiting a farm is assessing whether what the farmer has done could reasonably achieve the action's aim. The question is not just whether the records say the right thing — it is whether the field evidence confirms it.
Dated, geotagged photographs are the core of SFI evidence for most actions. DEFRA's guidance (Annex A of the SFI Handbook) requires photographs that show progress over time, not just a single image. An inspector looking at a cover crop action wants to see photographs showing the crop at establishment, through the season, and at termination. A photograph from one date proves you took a photograph — it does not prove the action was delivered to standard.
This has implications for farm software. A system that allows you to record a cover crop as "established" on one date with a single attached photograph is not producing the evidence base that SFI actually requires. You need dated photo sequences linked to specific field parcels and specific actions.
Beyond photographs, evidence for SFI actions typically includes:
Records must be kept for 7 years from the end of the agreement. For a 3-year agreement, that means records held for up to 10 years from when you entered the action. This is a longer retention requirement than most farm bookkeeping, and a system that does not store evidence against specific actions in a retrievable format will create problems at the end of the agreement period.
If a DEFRA administrative check or field inspection identifies a discrepancy, the consequences depend on severity. The RPA applies a proportionate response: minor issues may result in a request for further information, while confirmed non-compliance results in repayment of the payments received for the non-compliant area or action.
Repayment typically applies to the year of non-compliance rather than to multiple agreement years, and is calculated on the area of the breach rather than the full agreement area. Intentional, reckless, or repeated non-compliance attracts more severe penalties. The key practical protection is a clean, well-maintained evidence record: if you can demonstrate that the action was delivered to standard with dated photographs and supporting documents, a minor discrepancy is unlikely to result in repayment.
General farm management software built around BPS-era record-keeping was designed to track what land you hold and what crops are grown on it. That is necessary but not sufficient for SFI. The evidence requirements add a new layer that not all existing systems handle well.
A farm management system that genuinely supports SFI compliance needs to:
Most general crop management systems can be adapted to capture most of this. The gaps tend to be in photograph management (many systems treat photos as attachments rather than as structured evidence), in linking input invoices to specific SFI actions, and in managing the multi-year retention requirement across system migrations.
If you have both an SFI agreement and a Countryside Stewardship agreement, the record-keeping requirements have some overlap but are not identical. CS has historically had more prescriptive requirements for some option types, including specific prescriptions for management activities, habitat surveys, and species recording that go beyond what SFI typically requires. Some CS options also require pre-approval of management plans rather than just records of actions performed.
Managing both sets of requirements through a single system reduces the risk of gaps. A system designed only for one scheme type will create friction in tracking the other.