The Department of Agriculture has published a listing of non-productive investments (NPIs) under the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES). The NPIs are essentially actions which are available to farmers participating in ACRES Co-Operation Project (CP) to address environmental issues, directly contribute to environmental objectives, or increase a participant’s capacity to improve field scores through management.

There is significant funding available for NPIs. The maximum budget available for an ACRES CP participant is €10,500 per annum, or €52,500 over the five-year contract. This comprises of a maximum payment of €7,000/year for core objectives, including CP results-based payments and ACRES general action payments, where applicable.

This means that there is at least a possible fund of €17,500 available for NPIs over the five-year contract. The fund may be increased where a participant does not claim the maximum €7,000 core payment in any year of the contract, with the balance of unclaimed funds added to the total funds potentially available.

The Department explains that this ensures that farmers who do not receive a score of eight (results-based payments) and who are restricted on payments they could receive from ACRES general actions (due to the ring-fencing rule), and organic farmers who receive reduced payments for scores eight/nine/10, will have the ability to draw down the full funding of €52,500 over the five years.

Application process

NPIs are applied for via an ACRES adviser in an NPI annual works plan (AWP) or by the ACRES CP team in a landscape action annual works plan (LA-AWP), through the GLAMS mapping system provided by the Department of Agriculture.

NPIs are then screened by the respective CP team and approved or rejected. The local action plan for each CP region outlines the environmental assets and associated objectives and targets. The Department states that funding will be prioritised for actions that contribute to the delivery of these actions.

It states “where an action applied for does not address farm-level issues that have been identified in the scorecard assessments and/or does not benefit any Local Action Plan objectives or targets, it may be rejected”.

NPI categories

There are three categories of proposed NPIs to be made available to ACRES Co-operation participants.

  • Section 1 NPI Habitat and Wildlife Support.
  • Section 2 NPI Infrastructure.
  • Section 3 NPI Scrub/Track (Burren/Aran CP Zone only).

    • The table summarises the listing, the payment rate and maximum.