Top-up payments totaling €3.41 million will be issued, from this week, to farmers who signed up for the Green Low Carbon Agri-Environment Scheme (GLAS) and “undertook exceptional environmental commitments”.
The Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue, said the GLAS+ payments will give farmers an additional top-up payment of up to €2,000 under the scheme.
“This payment of €3.41 million will bring the total payments made to date in respect of GLAS to over €1.32 billion.
“I am also pleased to note that over 88.7% of GLAS participants have now been paid their advance payment in respect of their 2022 GLAS commitments,” the minister added.
GLAS
GLAS, which operated from 2014 to 2020, was designed to give payments to farmers to help” tackle climate change, preserve biodiversity, protect habitats and promote environmentally friendly farming”.
The scheme has been replaced by a new agri-environment scheme, the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES).
The Minister McConalogue said today (Wednesday, December 14) that ACRES would continue to be a “means” by which the government could support and encourage farmers to adapt to more “sustainable methods of farming”.
“I am very pleased to confirm that the ACRES scheme has been extremely popular with farmers, which illustrates farmers’ commitment to playing a leadership role in meeting our environmental and biodiversity ambitions”.
According to the minister, more than 46,000 applications were submitted and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will contact successful applications “in early 2023”.
ACRES applications
He told the Dáil yesterday (Tuesday, December 13) that he was exploring how all 46,000 applications could join Tranche 1 of ACRES.
The scheme currently has funding under budget allocation for 30,000 places.
The minister said: “The expectation was that we would have around 30,000 in the first tranche. I would love to bring all 46,000 in, we want to be able to enable all farm families to be able to participate in this and to back them both in terms of their farm income and also in terms of doing work in terms of contributing to the environment.”
He said he was currently exploring if there was budget available to ensure all 46,000 applications could participate in Tranche 1 of ACRES and if there was “capacity” in the system to accommodate 46,000 ACRES participants.