Senator Timmy Dooley has questioned if the Agri-Climate Rural Environmental Scheme (ACRES) is disincentivising positive biodiversity practices on farms.
The Fianna Fáil senator raised the concern at a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Environment and Climate Action yesterday (Tuesday, March 29), when he said that farmers are not being compensated for income losses that arise from biodiversity actions under the scheme.
One of the programmes mentioned by Senator Dooley was the Hen Harrier Programme, which supports farmers who take steps to protect the rare bird species.
“The scheme improved the entire biodiversity of the land because farmers adopted the restrictions,” said the senator.
“[But] the compensation for their loss in income for adopting these practices is now removed in the ACRES scheme, and rightly farmers feel cheated having signed up to the programme and accepted restrictions on the use of their land.
“They feel the government has pulled the rug from under them and this approach is undermining farmers’ confidence in the government’s efforts at improving biodiversity and reducing emissions,” he added.
Senator Dooley also raised eyebrows at the Burren designated programme, which also falls under ACRES, and said that it is another example of where policy has not followed the effort made by farmers.
“Farmers changed their practice, which benefitted biodiversity in a huge way, because their approach to farming got rid of all the hazel, allowing the fauna and flora to recover,” he said.
“And now the new ACRES scheme disincentives farmers to continue that effort. That’s wrong.”
The Fianna Fáil representative stated that he has made the issue clear to both the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) and Minister Charlie McConalogue and hopes it will be addressed.
ACRES portal opening
In other ACRES news, Mary Carey, principal officer at the DAFM Direct Payments Division announced last week (Thursday, March 23) that the application portal for the scheme has been unblocked on the agfood website.
This meant that farmers applying for ACRES could move forward with their Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) application, which covers nine different schemes.
It also means that farmers can now see the status of the actions that they included on their application.