Farm schemes expected in next two months

Late March is the likely opening date for important multi-annual farm schemes such as the beef data and genomics programme, farm improvement grants, support for collaborative farming, discussion groups, and LEADER grants.

The €1.4 billion GLAS agri-environment scheme is predicted by Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney to open for applications somewhere between the middle and the end of February, with other schemes opening about one month later.

“I would still be hopeful that we can work to the timetable I committed to last year, which was to have people enter GLAS in October so they can get payments for the last three months of the year,” Mr Coveney told the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine last week.

All the schemes have been held up by delays in approval by the EU Commission of Ireland’s 2014-2020 Rural Development Programme.

Mr Coveney told the Committee that EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan has announced that the Commission will provide letters of comfort to member states whose rural development programmes have been agreed with the Commission in principle, but which are awaiting the full formal and legal adoption of the programme.

“This development should facilitate early implementation of RDP schemes and supports across member states.”

“I would certainly be hopeful that by the middle of next month, we will be in a position to at least make progress on the opening of GLAS, with a view to trying to open other schemes, probably in the middle of March.

“We are pushing hard to get agreement in principle on the detail of the key schemes and to get a letter of comfort, as soon as is practical and is legally possible, from the Commission”.

He confirmed that Government has allocated enough funding to facilitate GLAS payments to farmers for the last three months of the year

“We are prioritising getting GLAS open as soon as we can, but we need agreement in principle from the Commission that we can take the risk to do that, knowing that a letter of comfort is on the way.”

“We have made good progress on beef genomics and have gone from a situation in which the Commission had concerns about it to one in which it understands the thinking behind it and supports it. Some details still need to be finalised.”