Farmers and land managers look after nearly 70% of UK land, which means government biodiversity targets cannot be met without them.

Farmers have been paid to support wildlife through agri-environmental schemes since the late 1980s, but Brexit prompted a major redesign. The old Basic Payment Scheme, which paid mostly by the area of land farmed, is being phased out. In its place are the Environmental Land Management schemes, which link payments to environmental outcomes. The result is a crowded landscape: legacy schemes that are closed to new entrants, options at farm and landscape scale, and private markets such as biodiversity net gain and carbon.

For my MSc research at Imperial College London, I wanted to understand how this change feels from a farmer’s perspective. Working with Surrey Wildlife Trust, I spoke to 17 farmers and land managers across the county, from smallholdings to farms of more than 250 acres. Surrey is a fascinating place to ask this question - it is a busy, peri-urban county where farming sits alongside housing and recreation, and it is home to some of the country's most valuable chalk grassland, heathland and downland.

The things that got in the way

On paper, the picture looked encouraging: 13 of the 17 people I spoke to were enrolled in at least one scheme. But when I asked what shaped their decisions, three themes came up again and again.

The money does not always add up. A few farmers found schemes profitable, usually on larger parcels, where they could do the work themselves, or where the action matched what they already did. Far more often, farmers weighed the payment against the effort and decided it was not worth it. Nature-friendly actions will only last if they make commercial sense, and expecting farmers to keep doing them at a loss is not realistic.

The system is harder on smaller farms. More than half of the farmers I interviewed found signing up and participating in schemes difficult, and several described the process as "administratively exhausting". Many ended up working with an adviser, which takes a bigger bite out of a small payment.

The rules do not always fit the land. Farmers often described scheme rules as top-down and broad-brush. Some described participation as box-ticking rather than a partnership.

What this means for nature

Nature recovery works best at the scale of landscapes, with habitats that connect up across many farms and are looked after for decades. The farmers I spoke to were interested in working together, and many belonged to local farm clusters, but they mostly valued these for learning and company. Schemes and planning horizons tended to be short and individual, so collective, long-term projects were mostly an aspiration.

These limits seem to come from how the schemes are designed, not from any reluctance among farmers to do the right thing. A few ideas are worth exploring:

• Make applications easier and pay for advice, rather than leaving farmers to cover it.
• Support smaller farms financially. Staged or advance payments would stop them carrying the cost upfront.
• Fund the long-term upkeep of environmental features like hedges and ponds, not just their creation.
• Involve farmers in designing future schemes from the start. 
• Learn from local delivery. Farming in Protected Landscapes, a grant programme for projects in areas such as National Parks, was described by those who used it as much quicker and easier to work with.

A note of caution

This was a small, qualitative study. The farmers who took part were reached through Surrey Wildlife Trust's networks, so they may be more engaged with nature than the average farmer, and fieldwork took place over a busy harvest summer. I would not claim these findings apply to every farm in England, but the themes were consistent, and they echo what other UK-based research has found.

What stayed with me most is how much farmers want to do the right thing for their land, and how often the system gets in the way. Farmers also hold an unusual position. They own and manage the land, but what it provides, such as clean water, stored carbon and habitat for wildlife, benefits all of us. That is why nature recovery cannot be left to farmers alone. It needs farmers, government and the wider public to work together, with each side understanding what it can offer and what it is asking of others. If we want farms to be part of nature's recovery, making schemes work for the people running them looks like a good place to start.