From next year farmers in England will be paid to boost the health and fertility of their soils under the first stage of the England’s new post-Brexit subsidy scheme.

Farmers in England will be able to claim subsidies for improving soil health across their land under the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), the Government announced on Thursday.

Payments will range from £22 per hectare to £58 per hectare, with farmers encouraged to conduct regular soil health checks and to plant ‘cover crops’ to prevent soil erosion and runoff in the winter months. Moorland farmers are required to collect data on the soil health of their land to receive payments.

Soil is a vital carbon store but after decades of intensive ploughing and chemical use much of Britain’s soils are in poor condition.

Ministers hope using subsidies to incentivize better farming practices can set soil on the road to recovery, boosting its carbon storage potential, improving yields and reducing soil erosion.

But conservationists say the SFI is not radical enough to drive a revolution in sustainable agriculture.

CEO of The Wildlife Trusts Craig Bennett told i said the standards are set too low, rewarding farmers without requiring them to embrace greener practices.

“This was supposed to be a break from the past,” he said. “If you look at what is in SFI today, ultimately a lot of it is suddenly giving lots of subsidies for farmers to carry on with the status quo, with business as usual.”

He also complained that the details of key standards on issues such as pest management will not come until 2023 at the earliest. Mr Bennett said the changes should be launched together to ensure farmers adopt entirely new ways of working.

“It’s missing so many of the things that were promised,” he said. “We were promised this would be a world leading and ambitious agricultural transition where public money would be for public good. There’s no way it is that.”

It was a point echoed by Gareth Morgan, head of farming and land use policy at the Soil Association. He warned the standard did not do enough to shift farmers to adopt more sustainable practices across the board.

“Small tweaks to the status quo will not suffice,” he said. “Farming policy should incentivise a widespread shift to nature-friendly, agroecological farming.”