The Department for Agriculture, Food and the Marine has announced the key dates under the new Beef Environmental and Efficiency Pilot (BEEP) scheme.
The BEEP scheme will make payouts on the number of unweaned calves born on a holding between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, where the weight of the calves, and their live dams, has been recorded and submitted to the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF).
Applications to the scheme can be made between February 4 and February 22, 2019 – starting next week.
Under the scheme, farmers will be paid €40 / cow-calf pairing for collecting weight data on cows and calves.
Weight data is to be submitted to the department between March 8 and November 1, 2019, while payments will be made throughout December.
The department had already said that some 400 sets of weighing scales would be made available for this purpose, at a price of €50/day.
The scales can be pre-booked for use on a particular day, and collected by the farmer who will take the equipment to his or her own yard.
However, only scales registered in accordance with the scheme’s terms and conditions can be used.
The aim of the scheme is to target improvements on a herd basis, by giving individual farmers detailed feedback on the performance of his or her animals.
The payment’s aim is to incentivise the collection of data that is not currently available in significant quantity through the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF) under the Beef Data Genomics Programme (BDGP).
The department said that farmers do not have to be participating in BDGP to avail of the new BEEP scheme.