To date a total of 24,830 farmers have been approved under the GLAS scheme of which 22,898 have been given an October 1, commencement date, according to latest Department of Agriculture figures.

It says the 2015 estimates include €20m for GLAS payments in the current year, which will be sufficient to make an 85% first instalment payment to all those with an October 1, commencement date who are approved for part-year payment in 2015.

The Department has also said that there are an additional circa 2,000 applications that have had validation queries raised on them, which are being examined systematically by the Department.

The Department is finalising a review of these applications and it is planned to re-run these cases through the approval validation process in the week beginning November 23.

GLAS Tranche II

For GLAS II, to date almost 9,000 applications have been registered and the facility for advisors to submit applications should be in place before the end of this week

It has said that once an application is submitted it is not possible to amend it, so the Department is warning farmers and their advisors to ensure that they are completely happy with the application before submitting it.

To date, some 8,227 applications have been registered online for Tranche 2 of GLAS.

The Minister launched tranche 2 of GLAS on October 27 for the submission of GLAS applications with the objective of increasing scheme participation levels in 2016 to between 35,000 and 40,000.

Also Read: Everything you need to know about GLAS

This tranche will close on December 7 and, according to the Minister, no extension of this date will be necessary.

The overall target for GLAS is to attract 50,000 farmers into the new scheme over its lifetime.