Neil Heseltine of Hill Top Farm now has 300 cattle who graze outside all year round, a shift that he says has made the farm more profitable and dramatically reduced the hours he has to put into it.
But while these new subsidy schemes are welcomed in principle by many farmers, some find the funding available falls far short of the levels provided under earlier support systems.
“Going forward, do I see a future? I’m not sure where we’re going with it,” says James Foster, who has been farming beef and sheep on the Bolton Abbey Estate for 30 years. “I do believe the government don’t want us, but people have to eat and we just have to adapt with that.”
Defra says that an average of £2.3bn a year is being invested through its farming schemes in England and insists it is protecting farmers in trade deals and also making supply chains fairer.
Today, Scottish sheep and upland farmers face many of the same challenges of tighter margins, rising costs and falling appetite for lamb and mutton and the Holyrood government have likewise tried to move towards a subsidy regime which gives greater weight to the environmental benefits farmers can provide. One example is the “Sheep and Trees” initiative which aims to help farmers and land managers plant more woodlands without cutting the size of their flock.
There have been complaints from farmers that some of the schemes introduced in Scotland have not been easy enough to access, leading the Agriculture Minister Jim Farlie to commit to reviewing certain projects. At the start of this year NFU Scotland and other farming organisations also raised concerns that the amount of government money budgeted to support agriculture was not enough either to support farmers to profitably make food or to help them meet climate and nature goals.
In Northern Ireland, the sheep population has fallen for several years with the most recent stats from 2024 showing 1.9 million sheep across the region. The Ulster Farmers Union has criticised the exclusion of sheep farmers from the devolved administration’s future agriculture policy and called on Northern Ireland’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs to engage with the industry.
