The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is reminding farmers that unprotected urea in solid form will no longer be permitted to be spread on land after September 14, 2025.

DAFM issued a technical notice on February 28, 2025 to farmers and other fertiliser users. Unprotected urea is urea that has not been coated with a urease inhibitor.

This restriction applies to all urea nitrogen (N) products with ureic N content of 1% or above. This includes those products blended with secondary macronutrients, such as sulphur, and / or micronutrients, such as selenium.

However, the restriction does not apply to blends or compounds containing unprotected urea and phosphorus.

Furthermore, unprotected urea can still be used in liquid form as a fertiliser.

According to DAFM, moving from unprotected urea to urea in a protected form is a key element of Ireland's approach to reducing ammonia emissions, and ensuring continued compliance with ammonia reduction targets.

Separately, payments under the current Targeted Agricultural Modernisation Scheme (TAMS) - the third iteration of TAMS - have surpassed €90 million, according to DAFM.

According to the department's weekly figures, a total of €90.69 million has been paid under the current TAMS as of last Friday (August 29).

This figure includes just under €6,000 in manual payments.

Last week (up to Friday), some €1.172 million was paid across 10,324 individual payments under the current TAMS.

Last week also 12,454 payment applications submitted. So far in this TAMS, since it began in 2023, 33,944 approvals for investments have been issued.

Outstanding payments also continue to be issued for the previous TAMS scheme, which ran from 2014 to 2022.

€74,941 in payments were made under the previous TAMS last week, across 37,681 payments. There were 37,834 payments application submitted last week for investments approved under the last TAMS programme.

A total of €465.614 million has been paid under the last TAMS as of last week.