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 show that you did the action, 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. Ordinary crop records do not show that. The evidence requirements for SFI and CS are action-specific and detailed.
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The 2026 SFI offer has two application windows. June 2026 is for small farms up to 50 hectares, and for farms with no ELM agreement. September 2026 is 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. That is fewer than the 2024 offer, because 31 actions were removed after low uptake or a 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. Your Rural Payments declaration must match what the inspector finds in the field. A difference between the two is a common cause of a reduced payment.
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. Some systems let you mark a cover crop as "established" on one date, with one photo attached. That is not the evidence base SFI asks for. 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. You must keep this evidence for longer than most farm accounts. Your system must hold each piece of evidence against a specific action, and must find it again. A system that cannot do this will fail you at the end of the agreement.
A DEFRA check or a field inspection can find a difference. What happens next depends on how serious it is. The RPA matches its response to the problem. A minor issue brings a request for more information. A confirmed breach brings repayment of the money you received for that area or action.
Repayment usually covers the year of the breach, and not several agreement years. The RPA calculates it on the area of the breach, and not on the full agreement area. Intentional, reckless, or repeated non-compliance attracts more severe penalties. A clean evidence record is your best protection. Show that you did the action to standard, with dated photos and supporting documents. A small difference is then unlikely to cause a 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 for SFI, and it is not enough. 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 fall in three places. Many systems treat a photo as an attachment, and not as a record in its own right. Few link an input invoice to a specific SFI action. Few hold the evidence through the years of retention when the system itself is replaced.
Two of the three gaps above are features. A supplier can make a photo a record, and can link an invoice to an action.
The third gap is different. Your agreement runs for years, and the evidence must last longer than that. Most farms change software inside that period. The evidence then has to move, and a move is where evidence is lost.
A move is hard because the old system and the new system describe a parcel, an action and a photo in different ways. Somebody writes rules to match them, and any evidence that fits no rule is left behind.
We build farm systems on engage.re. It holds all data in five database tables, and those five tables never change. A new action or a new record type is a dictionary entry, and not a new table. There is no migration, so there is no move for your evidence to survive.
Your definitions travel with your records as well, so an export carries the meaning and not only the values. We explain that in vendor lock-in, what can you prove.
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 set stricter rules for some option types. It names the management activities, the habitat surveys and the species recording. SFI usually asks for less. 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.
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Our live farm demo opens without a login, and it covers the SFI work in this article. Sign in as owner and geotag the SFI action evidence, or as worker and log the parcel mapping. It is a working system, not a screenshot.