A farm organisation has called on “roundtable” discussions to take place among stakeholders to address issue plaguing the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES).
The Irish Natura and Hill Farmers’ Association (INHFA) has called for full engagement with stakeholders to take place in order to find “workable solutions” to a series of ongoing issues that have dogged the scheme.
INHFA president Vincent Roddy said that many farmers, especially those in the ACRES cooperation project (CP) stream, have become “totally disillusioned with the scheme”.
The issues flagged by the INHFA are wide-ranging, including: delays in finalising balancing payments to farmers; the requirement that interim payments be partially repaid without the possibility to boost payments through non-productive investments (NPIs); delays in providing farmers with information on habitat scores; and the rescoring of some commonages where farmers were not informed of the previous scores.
Roddy said: “These are some of the main issues that continue to be outlined at meetings with farmers.
“However, there are other issues that individual farmers have detailed to us that are also critical and must be addressed if we are going to improve the scheme,” he added.
Some of these other issues include: the inability to carry out actions applied for under NPIs as approval has not been granted for those actions; the hold-up in sanctioning landscape actions (LAs); and a reduction in overall payments made to organic farmers.
According to Roddy, the best way forward is by including all stakeholders in a roundtable forum.
These stakeholders should, the INHFA president said, include the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine; the Agricultural Consultants’ Association (ACA); Teagasc; the CP teams (which administer the scheme in the CP zones); and farmer representatives bodies.
“We are now calling on (Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine Charlie McConalogue) to establish this forum at the earliest possible opportunity but ideally by the end of October,” Roddy said.
He added: “Through such a forum, we are willing, with the other stakeholders, to work in finding solutions, whether that takes a day, a week, a month, or longer.”
Separately the Independent Ireland Councillor, Noel Thomas, has also called on the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) to “suspend the recovery process” for ACRES overpayments.
He said schemes, like ACRES, need “to be about helping farmers and not about penalising them”.
Cllr. Thomas added today: “It is impossible to understate the impact of the weather on the farming community.
“The weather impacts calving for farmers with stock as well as the price of silage and bedding.
“We need to let our farmers concentrate on farming and spend less time filling out forms,” he stated.