Many advisors currently scoring the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES), particularly co-operation (CP) applications, are under “significant mental stress”, according to the president of the Agricultural Consultants’ Association (ACA).
Noel Feeney said that this is due to the smartphone app used by advisors to score land parcels, AgriSnap, giving trouble in areas of poor coverage.
He also pointed to the “numerous” scorecards that must be completed for CP applications, which he said was “mind boggling”.
These issues have now been compounded by difficult weather conditions for field scoring, he said.
The ACA president told Agriland that asking advisors to complete ACRES CP scoring by August 31, is “an impossible deadline”.
There are two streams in ACRES – general and co-operation.
ACRES co-operation is one of two approaches available to farmers in defined high-priority geographical areas, and involves results-based payments along with bespoke farm and landscape actions.
The general approach, available outside these CP zones, offers a range of actions for individual farmers.
Advisors
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) has published a series of questions raised by ACA members related to the new €1.5 billion scheme.
Many of the members raised issues with the ACRES scoring app not working in the field or offline.
“When can we be sure and confident to use AgriSnap. We can’t be driving 30 miles to discover it isn’t functioning properly,” one advisor asked.
Another said that “getting the app to work efficiently in areas of poor coverage is a disaster and eats up valuable time”.
“We as advisers have to take the risk in these areas if things go wrong with potential fines for our clients when the system that we are dealing with is inadequate,” they added.
“I wanted to call to a few neighbours the same day to score their fields but most of my clients are not sent to AgriSnap yet so I can’t plan my days like this. It is very stressful,” an advisor said.
Others brought up issues with scorecards not being available or failing to submit properly.
“You’re in constant doubt as to what has been successfully completed and not completed (through no fault of your own).
“It’s just not working – simple as that. It needs to be split over two years,” an ACA member stated.
“When schemes are rushed mistakes are made,” another added.
DAFM
In response, the department said that there is currently no backlog of ACRES scorecards to issue.
It said that an issue related to duplicate scorecards being generated for several farmers has been resolved.
As of June 29, over 90% of ACRES CP scorecards were available; it was noted that several ACRES CP farm plans were yet to be issued.
The department said it was working on a CP Farm Plan document for advisors which would show all delineated parcels, fields, unique field identifications and the default scorecard assigned to each field.
“You are advised to log into the GLAM [Generic Land Management System] app to check the status of the scorecards and print the maps before visiting the site,” DAFM told the ACA members.
The department said that the AgriSnap app and its performance is “monitored daily” with issues being resolved “in real time”, adding:
“It is important to evaluate the quality of the phone in use as this will impact on the functioning of the app.”
Advisors were told that any issues with applications not appearing on the app should be emailed to the department.
DAFM said that the unique field identifier can be viewed on GLAM for each CP field that can be scored, the unique field identifier (ID) is also visible on the app for each scorecard request for CP fields.