Advice has been provided to farmers regarding corrections to their 2024 Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) and other area-based schemes.
The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) announced there are “two important opportunities” regarding corrections to applications in these schemes.
The first of these are preliminary checks which will identify any over-claims, overlaps or dual claims.
Notifications will be issued where the department finds such an error on the farmer’s 2024 BISS application.
Where a farmer or advisor receives a preliminary check notification, they should log on to www.agfood.ie and respond before the deadline of Friday, June 21.
Secondly, notifications relating to the Area Monitoring System (AMS) are due to begin from Thursday, June 6 for a minority of farmers.
The first round of AMS notifications are for the potential presence of artificial surfaces, for example: buildings, farmyard extensions and farm roadways, in land parcels(s).
Farmers will have until Thursday, June 20 to respond to these notifications.
Further rounds of AMS notifications will issue from July 2024 onwards.
These preliminary checks and AMS notifications allow the farmer the opportunity to rectify issues with their BISS and other area-based scheme applications, without penalty.
Farmers and advisors should check the correspondence section of their agfood.ie online account.
Where a farmer is signed up for text message alerts, a text will issue to advise them that they have a notification on their agfood.ie account.
In total, 124,274 BISS applications were submitted from across the country by the deadline of Wednesday, May 15.
This figure includes 2,482 temporary reference number applications which are currently undergoing administrative checks by the department to determine eligibility.
Meanwhile, the satellite-based AMS will be used to check farmer compliance with the extensively-grazed pasture and winter bird food measures under the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES).
The system is based on regular and systematic observation, tracking and assessment of the agricultural activities on agricultural areas using the Copernicus Sentinal Satellite data.