The Young Farmers Scheme was designed to give farmers starting off in their careers a leg up and encourage more young people into the sector.
However, the first year of the scheme has turned out to be nothing short of a disaster for many farmers who applied.
Huge delays in the issuing of payments under the Young Farmers Scheme is leading to a lot of anger on the ground among the farmers involved.
Under the Basic Payment Scheme, most farmers started receiving their payments back in early October, while payments under the National Reserve and Young Farmers Scheme commenced in mid-December 2015.
However, many Young Farmers Scheme applicants are still waiting for their money almost seven months on from when their counterparts first saw money flowing into their accounts.
Only last year the Department and farmers groups signed off on the Farmers Charter which had a target payment date of December 1 for the Young Farmers Scheme. In its first year, no Young Farmer Scheme payment was received by this date.
The Department of Agriculture received over 7,000 National Reserve and 8,500 Young Farmers Scheme applications.
But, the latest figures state that hundreds of applicants to the Young Farmers Scheme have yet to receive payment.
Getting payments three or four months after it’s due is hardly an advantageous situation for young farmers with many depending on the payments coming in before Christmas to make bank repayments and pay bills.
And, if the situation wasn’t bad enough, communicating with the Department was something akin to communicating with a brick wall in recent months.
Many farmers have complained of getting zero correspondence from the Department on progress of their application, while others have spent hours on hold trying to get through to a relevant section in the Department only to end up talking to an answering machine.
If nothing else, the difficulty in speaking to someone directly in the Department on this issue makes a mockery of the Department’s target in the Farmers Charter to answer the phone calls within 20 seconds.
Farmers are well aware that Department officials are under pressure around payment times but it’s not unreasonable to expect some level of correspondence from the Department when payments are delayed.
The problems with the scheme are really unfortunate as the young farmer top-up was a real opportunity to inject some badly-needed youth into the sector.
Let’s hope year one of the scheme is an exception, because there is no doubt that the experience has left a bad taste in many young farmers’ mouths.