Do England’s new Environmental Land Management support schemes meet the requirements for regenerative farmers?

The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union has led to a revision of its agricultural and environmental policies. For England, a new system of support payments to farmers are the Environmental Land Management Schemes. Concurrently, regenerative agriculture is gaining traction as a farming system in England to produce food alongside sustained environmental improvements. This paper examines the policy process and development of the new English schemes, specifically the Sustainable Farming Incentive and the revised Countryside Stewardship; in turn, followed by a review of regenerative agriculture identifying its core principles. An innovative qualitative scoring system is developed to map the aims and actions of the new schemes, as introduced to the end of 2023, against these core principles for regenerative farming. The scoring system offers a policy tool for aligning regenerative principles with current and future iterations of agri-environmental support schemes. The results of the scoring system find that the new schemes and their actions are mainly applicable to larger scale arable producers. The schemes meet the principles of regenerative farming, with the marked exception of the integration of livestock into the production system. The English schemes will need to address the role of livestock in regenerative farming systems as regenerative farming principles gain more popularity, following the more recent example of Scotland.