Over 14,000 farmers with shares on the 7,000 commonages across the country can get access to GLAS under the priority Tier 1.

With a payment of €120/ha, farmers will have to have 42ha to hit the maximum of €5,000 from this measure. Farmers below this can top up with actions on their private land. However, any commonage farmer wishing to join GLAS must be part of a Commonage Management Plan (CMP). So farmers have to get their GLAS online application in before the deadline to apply. However, the biggest challenge for commonage planners is the deadline of 3 July that has been set to have all CMPs completed.

There are 422,000ha of commonage across the country. Twenty five counties have commonages, but the percentage is highest along the western seaboard. Mayo has the highest, with 30% of its land in commonage.

On small commonages (less than or equal to 10ha) a farmer with more than 0.25ha must have an individual commonage farm plan drawn up by their GLAS planner. Farmers on commonages larger than 10ha must be part of a CMP. This has to be drawn up by a GLAS commonage planner and will cover all farmers on the commonage who choose to join GLAS.

The big debate about the number of farmers who must sign up from each commonage has been side-stepped by the Department making the 50% a recommendation not a requirement for commonage farmers joining GLAS.

Know your neighbour

To help farmers who want to join GLAS and planners to prepare the plans, the Department has released the information of all farmers who claimed a commonage share of their 2014 single farm application for the first time.

The excel sheet, which has nearly 29,500 rows, lists not only the townland and the county, but also the name and address of each farmer and what commonage they claimed in 2014. Some farmers have a shareholding on more than one commonage.

This is the first time farmers can see who their neighbours on the commonage actually are and what area they submitted. The digitised and reference areas are based on the Department Land Parcel Identification System database.

The GLAS commonage area includes certain exclusions – specifically bog, habitat, marsh, rough grazing and scrub. This is because the Department recognises that these areas deliver significant biodiversity value on commonages.

The aim under GLAS is to ensure that commonage lands are grazed and managed to remain in GAEC and are compliant with eligibility criteria. To try and achieve this, minimum and maximum ewe equivalents allowed on the commonages have been set. The Department breaks these down to the minimum and maximum for each individual shareholder.

Interestingly the Department also gives an indicative number of the farmers it believes should be in any CMP. This threshold is based on 50% of active shareholders who declared on SFP in 2014 and had sheep in 2013. It does not take into account farmers with cattle only. There must always be two or more farmers except where there is only one shareholder.

Where a farmer has shares on more than one commonage, they will be required to sign up to a CMP on all other commonages they farm should one become available. Failure to enter into a CMP on second and subsequent commonage where your first commonage has a CMP will result in your GLAS application being rejected/ terminated and all payments recouped.