There is “full funding” to cover the 50,000 farmers who have applied to the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) but “it is capped at 50,000 as things stand”, the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine has stated.
Minister Charlie McConalogue said agreement and budgets are in place to be “able to fully fund” 50,000 farmers, but that over the next year the government will “assess how many more farmers are in the scheme and monitor that as it goes forward”.
The minister was questioned in the Dáil by the Independent TD for Wexford, Verona Murphy, yesterday (Thursday, October 26) as to whether sufficient resources had been allocated to ACRES.
Deputy Murphy said: “It does not seem to me that €1.5 billion will be sufficient to accommodate 50,000 farmers.
“From a climate change perspective, the reality of regulations across the sectors is that we are piling the costs onto dairy farmers at the expense of tillage farmers.
“We are driving up the cost of land for tillage farmers in order to accommodate dairy farmers vis-à-vis the nitrates directive.”
Deputy Murphy also asked Minister McConalogue that if more than 50,000 farmers applied to participate in ACRES would “extra funding be drawn from somewhere?”
“I am concerned that we have such input and co-operation from our farming sector but in major sectors such as forestry, we are unable to get to grips with what should be one of our greatest assets in terms of reducing carbon emissions, which is to sow trees.
“We are letting farmers do it through ACRES. They are planting trees and hedges and are doing so quite efficiently but the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) cannot do it.
“There are lots of other ways that we can reduce our carbon emissions but we are concentrating solely on the agricultural sector and penalising farmers to within an inch of their lives,” she added.
But the minister defended his department’s track record on forestry and said “massive work has gone into it over the past couple of years”.
“Anybody applying for a forestry licence today will receive it within six months if it does not require an impact assessment or within nine months if such an assessment is needed.
“We have put massive resources and investment into forestry and have also put significant funding into tillage. We have invested heavily in ACRES which is why we are seeing such a strong uptake,” he added.