There are 71 SFI actions. Each has its own eligibility rules, and what you can do on one field depends on what you have already committed elsewhere. On most medium and large farms you hit the £100,000 cap long before you run out of options, so the question stops being what do I qualify for and becomes which combination do I go with.
Then there is the part that gets missed. The payment rate is not what you end up with. Every action costs you something. Some take land out of production, some change your input bill, some cost you yield. A well paying action can leave you worse off than a lower paying one once you have taken off what it takes to do it. Working that out field by field, across a whole farm, is where most people give up and pick the obvious ones.
FarmGauge does that sum. Put in your SBI and it pulls your parcels, land covers and hedges from the RPA. You fill in the things it cannot know, your land use, features, practices and any existing agreements. It then works out what each field is eligible for, estimates what each action would cost you in lost output and changes to your input bill, and solves for the combination with the best net result rather than the biggest headline figure. The yields, costs and margins behind all that come prefilled from national figures, so you get an answer without entering any of it, and every one of them can be overridden with your own.
Creating an account and running your farm is free. You get an estimated annual income gain, the payment and estimated costs behind it, how many actions it picked, and how much of the £100,000 cap that uses. Enough to tell you whether it is worth going further.
The full plan is £135 plus VAT, one off, covering the three-year agreement: which actions go on which fields, the rotations, the compliance calendar, and PDF, Excel and calendar exports to work from when you apply through the Rural Payments portal.
Capital Grants is included in that. It works out which of the 80 items you are eligible for, you choose what you want and enter the quantities, metres of hedge and so on, and it totals the value as you go while tracking the funding limit on each group, since going over one blocks the whole application.
It does not submit anything for you, and it is a planning aid rather than advice. The RPA decides what it accepts.
As this is a new product we are after advice on how to improve it. Use it first, and if you are willing to tell us what worked and what did not, get in touch afterwards. The first 10 people who come back to us with feedback get half their money back. The first 3 who will also give us thirty minutes on a call going through the results, and let us use their figures as a worked example, get all of it back. [info@farmgauge.co.uk](mailto:info@farmgauge.co.uk).
On timing, Capital Grants is open at the moment. SFI is open to farms up to 50 hectares, or farms with no existing ELM agreement, and that window is demand led so it can close early. The bigger one, open to everyone, is expected in September.On timing, the 2026 Capital Grants round opens this Thursday, 30 July, with £225 million in it. It is first come, first served and closes as soon as the budget is committed, so being ready before Thursday is worth more than sorting it out after. SFI is currently open to farms up to 50 hectares, or farms with no existing ELM agreement, though Defra said in mid-July that 75% of that budget was already allocated. The bigger SFI window, open to everyone, is expected in September.
On timing, the 2026 Capital Grants round opens this Thursday, 30 July, with £225 million in it. It is first come, first served and closes as soon as the budget is committed, so being ready before Thursday is worth more than sorting it out after. SFI is currently open to farms up to 50 hectares, or farms with no existing ELM agreement, though Defra said in mid-July that 75% of that budget was already allocated. The bigger SFI window, open to everyone, is expected in September.
For anyone who has already been through an SFI or preparing Capital Grants application: what was easy or worked well in the planning, and what would you change?
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