SFI26 Evidence Requirements: What Your Farm Management Software Needs to Capture

SFI26 replaces SFI24 with 71 actions, a £100,000 annual cap, and evidence requirements that most farms are not equipped to meet at scale. You must record photo evidence, dated field logs, soil test results, invoices and receipts. You must record them for every action, and link them to every parcel. You must then keep them for seven years after your agreement ends. Application Window 1 opens in June 2026 and may close early if the budget is allocated. This guide covers four things. The evidence you need. How long you must keep it. What the main software platforms do. Where the gaps are.

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What Changed from SFI24 to SFI26

SFI26 is a significant restructure, not a minor update. The key changes affect how many actions you can take, how much you can earn, and how you prove you did what you claimed.

• 71 actions, down from 102. 31 actions were removed, including widely used management actions such as soil assessments, nutrient assessments, pest assessments, and hedgerow assessments. All SFI management payments have been withdrawn
• £100,000 annual agreement cap. Only one SFI26 agreement is permitted per farm. This cap is designed to spread funding more widely across holdings
• 3-hectare minimum eligibility threshold. Farms below 3 hectares are excluded from SFI26
• 3-year agreements. All actions are now 3-year commitments, replacing the mixed durations of SFI24. This simplifies planning but locks you in
• Payment rate changes. Some rates increased (e.g. moderate livestock grazing on moorland: £20/ha to £35/ha). Others decreased substantially (herbal leys: £382/ha to £224/ha; winter bird food: £853/ha to £648/ha). Existing SFI agreements retain their original payment rates

Application Windows

Window 1 opens in June 2026, and it should stay open for about two months. It can close sooner if demand is high and the budget runs out. Window 2 opens in September 2026 and is available to all farms. If you are planning to apply in Window 1, your evidence capture infrastructure needs to be operational before the agreement starts, not after.

The Evidence Problem: What SFI26 Actually Requires

The simplification of SFI26 (fewer actions, clearer definitions) does not mean lighter evidence requirements. Inspectors do not rely on verbal accounts. They rely on proof that can be traced back in time and clearly linked to your claim. "Simpler does not mean lighter on compliance," as the Defra guidance makes clear.

Evidence Types

The evidence types you will need most often are:

• Photographs. Clear, dated photos showing the whole feature plus close-ups. GPS-tagged where possible. Linked to the specific parcel and action. As a minimum, take one wide shot of each field you enter, and show the boundaries. Then take two or three close photos of the key features, such as cover crops, margins, drains, hedge condition and gateways
• Short videos. Dated and clearly showing the feature or operation in question
• Dated field operation logs. Records of what was done, when, on which parcel, by whom. Includes cultivation, drilling, spraying, mowing, grazing periods, and any management interventions
• Soil test results. Linked to specific parcels and dated. Some actions require baseline soil testing before the action begins
• Invoices and receipts. For seed, fertiliser, fencing, equipment, contractor work. Must be linkable to specific actions and parcels
• Notes linking evidence to claims. Written notes that show how and when you met an action's aim, connecting the physical evidence to the annual declaration

Retention Requirements

All evidence must be retained for seven years after the agreement ends. With 3-year agreements, that means up to 10 years of records for evidence captured in year one. Annual and rotational declarations must be submitted digitally via the RPA portal. The records backing those declarations need to be retrievable for a decade.

What Farm Management Software Currently Handles

The main UK farm management platforms (Farmplan, Gatekeeper, Muddy Boots, Ag-Hub) were built for crop planning, field records, and compliance reporting. They handle many of the record-keeping requirements well, but the SFI26 evidence capture problem is different from conventional farm record-keeping. For a full comparison of these platforms, see our farm management software comparison.

SFI26 Requirement	Farmplan	Gatekeeper	Muddy Boots	JustFarm
Field operation logs	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
GPS-tagged photo capture	Limited	Limited	Limited	Yes (mobile app)
Photo linked to parcel + action	Manual	Manual	Manual	Automated
Soil test result storage	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Invoice/receipt linking to actions	Manual	Manual	Manual	Partial
10-year retention with retrieval	Depends on subscription	Depends on subscription	Depends on subscription	Cloud-based
Annual declaration preparation	Manual	Manual	Manual	Guided

JustFarm is the only platform built around SFI evidence. Its mobile app takes GPS-tagged photos, and it links them directly to parcels and actions. The older platforms keep conventional farm records well. Farmplan, Gatekeeper and Muddy Boots all do this. They need manual work to link a photo to a specific SFI action and parcel. For most farms, that manual linking is where the system breaks down at scale.

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FETF 2026: Using Tech Grants to Fund Evidence Infrastructure

The Farming Equipment and Technology Fund (FETF) 2026 offers £50 million across three themes: Productivity (£20m), Slurry (£10m), and Animal Health and Welfare (£20m). Grants range from £1,000 to £25,000 per theme, with a combined maximum of £75,000 per business. Most items are funded at 40 to 50 percent of their listed cost.

The application deadline was extended to midday on 12 May 2026. This is expected to be the final standalone round of FETF in its current format, with changes planned from 2027.

FETF funds precision tools, monitoring systems, and digital technologies. Your farm may need GPS devices, soil testing equipment or digital monitoring systems. FETF can pay a large part of that cost. The connection is direct: the same digital tools that qualify for FETF funding are the ones that generate the evidence SFI26 requires.

A separate Capital Grants round with £225 million available opens in July 2026 for larger investments. For more on how grant schemes connect to farm software requirements, see our SFI and ELMS software requirements guide.

Building an Evidence Capture System for SFI26

Your evidence work should follow the same four steps. This holds for farm management software, for a tool such as JustFarm, and for a system of your own.

1. Parcel and Action Setup

Before your agreement starts, map every parcel to every action you have selected. Each action has specific evidence requirements. Your system should list what evidence types are needed for each action on each parcel, so nothing is missed during the agreement period.

2. Ongoing Evidence Capture

Throughout the year, capture evidence as operations happen. Photographs taken at the time of an operation (drilling, mowing, grazing) are far more credible than retrospective photos. GPS tagging and automatic date stamping eliminate disputes about when and where evidence was captured. Your system should make field evidence easy to record on a phone. It should then link that evidence to the correct parcel and action without more work.

3. Annual Declaration

At the end of each scheme year, you must submit an annual or rotational declaration via the RPA portal. Your system should collect the evidence for each action across all parcels. It should mark any gaps. It should then prepare what the declaration needs. This is the point where farms without organised evidence discover the problem.

4. Storage and Retrieval

Seven years after your agreement ends, you must still be able to retrieve any piece of evidence on demand. This rules out local storage on a single phone or computer (which may be replaced multiple times over a decade). Cloud-based storage with structured retrieval by parcel, action, date, and evidence type is the practical requirement.

The two parts that are architecture

Most of an evidence system is a set of screens. Two parts are not.

Seven years of retention. The scheme asks you to keep evidence for seven years after your agreement ends. A folder of photos does not meet that on its own. A file can be moved, replaced or lost, and nothing records the change. We build farm systems on engage.re. Each record carries its own retention rule, so the system knows how long to keep it. Each entry is also an event that carries a hash of the entry before it. A change to one entry breaks the chain, so an inspector can see that the record is whole.

One photo, two schemes. A hedge photo can serve an SFI action and a Red Tractor check at the same time. It only serves both if the two schemes agree about the parcel, the date and the feature. On engage.re your record types are declared before any data exists, and the server refuses a write outside that declaration. One record therefore means the same thing to both schemes, and you record the evidence one time.

We explain why a shared meaning is needed for that in MCP and A2A move messages. We explain retention and proof of deletion in can you prove you deleted someone's data.

When Bespoke Software Makes Sense

For farms running a single holding with a small number of SFI actions, JustFarm or a well-configured Gatekeeper setup will handle evidence capture adequately. For more complex operations, bespoke makes sense in specific scenarios.

• Multi-holding operations. Some farms hold several holdings, with a different SFI agreement and action set for each one. Each parcel then needs its own evidence. Those farms need one view across the holdings, with the records for each agreement kept apart. Off-the-shelf platforms are typically designed for single-holding management
• Diversified farms. Farms combining arable with livestock, farm shop, glamping, or events need evidence capture that works alongside booking systems, stock management, and retail POS. A bespoke system can handle SFI evidence within a broader operational platform rather than running multiple disconnected tools. We cover diversification software needs in our farm diversification guide
• Farms that need Red Tractor and SFI evidence in one system. Many farms hold Red Tractor assurance beside SFI. The evidence requirements overlap significantly (field records, spray records, livestock health plans). A system of your own records the evidence one time, and applies it to both schemes. You then stop running a separate tool for each one
• Farms where the farmer will not use an app. Some farming operations have workforce demographics where a smartphone app is not the right interface. A system of your own can use rugged tablets, voice recording or simple input screens. You build them for the people who record the evidence in the field

SFI26's simplification of actions is welcome. The evidence requirements behind those actions are not simple. Some farms will set up their evidence before Window 1 opens. They will hold a real advantage over farms that find the gaps after the first declaration.

Sources

• SFI26: details, definitions and what to expect (Defra Farming Blog)
• FETF 2026: guidance and application (GOV.UK)
• What SFI 2026 means for your farm and your paperwork (JustFarm)
• Winter evidence for SFI 2026 (JustFarm)
• The new SFI offer for 2026 (Defra Farming Blog)
• Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 (SFI26): scheme information (GOV.UK)
• SFI: guidance for applicants and agreement holders (GOV.UK, RPA)
• Countryside Stewardship grants (GOV.UK)
• Rural Payments Agency (GOV.UK)

Our live farm demo opens without a login, and it covers the SFI26 evidence work in this article. Sign in as owner and capture the 10-year SFI26 photo evidence with geotag, or as worker and attach the invoice. It is a working system, not a screenshot.

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