The Department of Agriculture has revealed that GLAS 1 farmers look set to receive on average €4,200 per annum under the scheme.
It says that at this stage it looks like some 1,400 applications from the first tranche will qualify for GLAS Plus, increasing their annual payment to around €6,500 on average.
The maximum payment available under GLAS is €5,000.
2015 GLAS payment
At the end of December 2015, the Department processed a first instalment of the 2015 part-year payments (covering the three month period 1 October -31 December 2015) for GLAS Tranche 1 applications.
To be eligible for a part-year payment, it was necessary to have an approved start-date of October 1, 2015 for the GLAS contract start, have GLAS actions which are payable in 2015, and to have passed the Department’s payment validation checks.
Payment
According to the Department, these first instalment payments represent up to 85% of the estimated value of the 2015 part-year payment.
Some 17,500 applicants received their first instalment 2015 payment in December, with an average payment of €650 per applicant, the Department says.
It says it is continuing to process applications which are eligible for a 2015 part-year payment and further payments will be processed by the end of January.
The Department says the balancing payments in respect of 2015 part-year payments are scheduled to be processed in May 2016 when all GLAS 2015 inspections have been completed. This 2015 part-year balancing payment will include the GLAS+ payments for eligible applications.
It also says that it is important to note that these part-year payments are purely in respect of actions that were applicable to 2015 and cannot be used as a basis to extrapolate the average value of a GLAS contract over a full year.
Farmers will only see the full value of their contracts when payments are calculated for 2016, the first full year of their five-year contracts, it says.