Ricardo Future Farming Resilience Fund

What is the Future Farming Resilience Fund?

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Future Farming Resilience Fund will provide support to farmers and land managers as they prepare for the agricultural transition. This project, managed by Ricardo, is available to farming businesses in England that are in receipt of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payments. Ricardo is working in partnership with Andersons, Neil Wilson from SAB Advisory Ltd, the Farming Community Network (FCN), Sarah Starkey from Herefordshire Rural Hub, Mary Dimambro from Cambridge Eco Ltd, Fraser Hugill from Eaton & Hugill, Briony Burge & John Morgan from Creedy Associates, Elaine Jewkes from Soil Sense and Andrew Wells from Arable Alliance Ltd.

The full list of FREE support services available within this programme :

Business Support - You will receive three days of free consultancy support, including a face-to-face meeting with a business consultant from The Andersons Centre, a detailed report and action plan, and follow-up support. The assistance is tailored to your needs, and typically might include:

• Providing expertise to review your business and help with future planning.
• Looking at joint ventures, diversification or the feasibility of options for the future.
• Business finance, debt re-structuring, analysis of capital investment and future funding, or forward budgeting and cashflow management.

Environmental Sustainability Support - You will be offered one day of personal support from an agri-environment expert to look at environmental opportunities, including:

• Agri-environmental opportunities through government schemes.
• Improving soil health and resilience.
• Pollution prevention and risk minimisation.
• Enhancing biodiversity and conservation.
• Increasing carbon sequestration/reducing carbon losses on farm. You will receive a report to document opportunities identified, actions agreed and to provide links to information and guidance on taking next steps.

Free toolbox - Resources available to help you to gain confidence in identifying and taking the steps needed to make your businesses more resilient. Resources are available on our website’s training pages and include: videos, podcasts, technical articles and simple self-help checklists. Register online for free one-to-one support at https://ffrf.ricardo.com/ or contact us to register your interest in receiving information about the events.

Online events and podcasts - We deliver quarterly on-line events and a series of monthly podcasts offering information on business, personal, and environmental resilience, and much more.

Workshop events will follow these quarterly webinars at six regional hubs where a regional coordinator will be your local on the ground contact with the programme.

All the advice provided will be completely free of charge. Places are limited so booking is essential and unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that everyone who registers will be offered a place.

If you require help with the registration or have any questions, please contact the Ricardo Future Farming Resilience Project team: 01235 753530 or email FFRF@ricardo.com