Building Integrated Pest Management outcomes into the design of the Environmental Land Management Scheme
As a result of leaving the European Union, the UK developed a new policy framework to replace the European Common Agriculture Policy. There are a range of measures to support farmers and land managers, underpinned by the Agriculture Act 2020.
A core element of the new support system is the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) which provides a basis for the government to pay farmers for providing environmental and other public goods. This is intended to help deliver the government’s environmental targets, and to ensure fair rewards for farmers and land managers in return for delivering public goods to complement market returns.
ELMS has gone through various iterations since it was launched in 2021. Under the scheme, the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) has replaced the Basic Payments that farmers used to receive, with a menu of actions designed to deliver positive environmental outcomes. The good news is that both the English and Welsh SFIs do attempt to drive pesticide reduction by including payments for farmers adopting Integrated Pest Management (IPM). IPM is an holistic approach to managing pests, diseases or weeds in which chemical pesticides are used only as a last resort, if at all. However, while the schemes do provide payments for farmers adopting IPM practices, they fall far short of the level of support required.
Increasing the uptake of IPM by UK farmers is vital to drive a reduction in pesticide use. There are a number of ways in which this objective could have been met through the new ELMs design and development process including: tests, trials and pilot schemes; outcomes and evidence assessments and guidance; advice and training for farmers and practitioners. This briefing explores these opportunities in detail and how IPM could be better incorporated into ELMS. It also includes some specific examples of where IPM can deliver basic and higher-level outcomes and provides case studies of where other countries have successfully integrated IPM into agri-environment support schemes.
The briefing concludes with a set of overarching recommendations for DEFRA and makes the proposition that, if ELMS was designed in a way which more effectively drove an uptake of genuine IPM approaches, then the scheme would be much more likely to deliver effectively on its overall objectives.
