Guidance

Hot and dry weather: temporary support for farmers in 2022

How to choose options with temporary adjustments to your Countryside Stewardship or Environmental Stewardship agreements to ease shortages of bedding, fodder, grazing, or forage crop.

This publication was withdrawn on

This guidance has been withdrawn as it is no longer current.

Applies to England

Documents

Details

At the end of July, the Rural Payments Agency (RPA) published guidance giving extreme heat advice for farmers and land managers, who were facing difficulties meeting requirements for rural grant and payment schemes due to the hot and dry weather.

Since then, Defra has approved temporary requirement adjustments to some Countryside Stewardship (CS) and Environmental Stewardship (ES) options due to the extreme challenges that farmers are facing this year. The options with temporary adjustments document lists these options.

As an agreement holder, you can choose to either continue with your existing options without adjustment or use the options with adjustments.

These adjustments generally apply from 17 August to 31 December 2022.

From 1 January 2023 all options will revert to their original requirements, unless otherwise stated in the detail of the individual options.

What the adjustments mean for agreement holders

Due to this year’s drought conditions, adjustments have been introduced, such as cutting or grazing additional areas of land, to help ease shortages of bedding, fodder, grazing or forage crops. This is mainly for your own use and to share with the wider community, but should not be for profit.

You must still meet with regulatory and cross compliance requirements, and consider soil conditions (poaching, compaction, run-off), particularly on land which is grazed or used by machinery.

Temporary adjustments will not affect any payments you receive under your agri-environment scheme agreement.

What you need to do

Fill in the temporary requirement adjustments form. You must keep this form for your records as this may be requested in the future. You do not need to return it to RPA.

Use a separate form for each agreement.

What records you need to keep

You will need to keep the following records and produce them, if you are asked to do so:

  • field operations at the parcel level, including associated invoices
  • stock records to show grazing activity on parcels

Failure of options established in Spring

If you initially established options AB9 and/or OP2 in spring following the usual prescriptions (such as AB9: establish between 1 March and 15 June) and the prolonged, dry summer has deteriorated them to such a point you consider the option has failed, we will still pay you for these options as long as you have followed the recommended management actions. You should complete a minor and temporary adjustment form and send this to RPA.

You don’t need to re-establish the options this year, but you will need to re-establish the options next year to continue to be paid for the options in subsequent years.

Published 17 August 2022
Last updated 26 September 2022 + show all updates
  1. OP1 - Overwintered stubble added to the list of options with a temporary adjustment.

  2. Section added to cover new guidance in the event of established Spring options which have failed. New temporary prescription adjustments added for options AB1, AB8, AB15 and AB16.

  3. information added to explain the effect of temporary adjustments on payments

  4. First published.