The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) has been urged to give “impacted farmers some breathing space” because of ongoing difficult weather conditions, by a farm organisation.
The Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) has also called on the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue to extend deadlines for the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) and review catch crop requirements.
The chair of IFA’s national rural development committee, Michael Biggins, believes the minister should “revisit” current deadlines in place because of challenging sowing conditions in many parts of the country.
“There are a few ACRES measures (grass margins, arable, protection/maintenance of archaelogical monuments including arable, riparian buffer strip/zone ) that require the establishment of protected margins and sowing of suitable seed mix by August 31.
““We’ve had the wettest July on record and things haven’t been much better in recent weeks so soil conditions are heavy and unsuitable for sowing in many parts of the country. There are many who haven’t yet had the opportunity to get seed into the ground or protected fences erected,” Biggins said.
He has proposed that “rather than doing unnecessary damage at this stage” the minister should give farmers’ some flexibility.
“Push the deadline out for a few weeks to let the ground dry up and give impacted farmers some breathing space.
“Similar should be applied for the planting of catch crops too,” Biggins added.
According to the IFA’s national rural development committee chair the current catch crop grazing requirements are “unworkable”.
He said the September 15 sowing deadline “is fast approaching” and the IFA expects that there is a lot of the 22,000 hectares committed to catch crops among ACRES still to be planted.
“For those that have catch crops planted before there was any awareness of these new regulations, the minister needs to confirm and give full assurance to farmers that they will not be in breach of GAEC 6 conditionality where these new catch-crop grazing requirements are not fully met.
“With the Area Monitoring System (AMS) we have the technology available rather than rely on inspector interpretation or unnecessarily flood the appeals system in the back end,” Biggins stated.
DAFM
He has also warned that if DAFM continues to insist that the lie-back can only be in grass this will make the growing of catch crops “uneconomic and unworkable for specialist tillage growers, not to mention having a massive impact on the store-lamb trade too.”
Biggins added:“These sectors are experiencing huge financial and operational challenges at the minute. We don’t need any more, particularly self-inflicted, pressures on the sector.
“Farmers feel like they are being regulated out of existence at this stage.”