Process Monitoring and Evaluation of the Sustainable Farm Incentive Pilot

This project concerns the design and delivery of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) for the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) Pilot. The SFI is one of the schemes being developed within the Environmental Land Mangement (E.L.M.) Programme.

Piloting is key to ensuring that we develop an E.L.M. programme capable of delivering against its objectives, as specified in the E.L.M. Outline Business Case (OBC). Piloting supports these objectives in several ways, enabling us to:

• Test and refine processes at scale, ensuring that they are suitable for Full Roll-out. Pilot monitoring will inform several strands of scheme design and development, including live changes to the user service; scheme policy design and delivery; and communications to pilot participants and wider stakeholders.

• Explore different aspects of the user and administrator experience in the context of a fully operational scheme, thereby contributing to co-design of a final preferred solution.

• Build-on proof of concept work via the E.L.M. Tests & Trials (T&T), triangulating conclusions from T&T projects and testing them on a different cohort

Farmers were invited to join the SFI pilot via an initial Expression of Interest (EOI), launched on 15th March 2021, with pilot agreements going live from 1st October 2021. The SFI pilot will run through to the launch of the full Environmental Land Management programme on 1st October 2024.