The maximum payment a farmer will be able to draw down under a new tillage crisis fund will be €10,500, it has been confirmed.
A spokesperson for the Irish Farmers’ Association’s (IFA’s) grain committee confirmed to AgriLand that the scheme will have a budget of approximately €1.5 million.
Farmers who lost crops last year during the harvest due to poor weather conditions will have to prove a crop loss of at least 30% to be eligible for the scheme; farmers with losses below this threshold will unfortunately be out of luck.
Meanwhile, farmers who lost between 30% and 50% of their crops last year will have their payments capped at €7,000. This equates to a payment of €200/ha up to 35ha.
It is expected that farmers will be able to apply to the scheme from sometime next week, the IFA spokesperson said.
This scheme will only be relevant to a small number of tillage farmers – which is thought to be below 200 – along the west coast of the country.
It has also been worked into the deal that the criteria of the scheme will allow for as much as 20% of a farmer’s crop to have been utilised on farm, the IFA source added. Losses with regards to moisture have also been taken into account.
The details of this scheme have come nearly a week after the IFA took the decision to suspend its protest at the headquarters of the department in Dublin. A halt was called to the protest just as it was about to enter its seventh night.
Officials from both the department and the IFA had been locked in negotiations since Wednesday, July 12, in order to iron out the details of the scheme.
The protest originally began on July 5, after reports emerged in the media that the department was going to introduce a compensation scheme for tillage farmers where payments would be capped at just €5,000/farmer.
The IFA was adamant at the time of the protest that it would stand for nothing less than the maximum payment allowed under EU regulations – €15,000/farmer. But it seems as if it has been forced to come to a compromise during the negotiations.