A key focus of Minister for Agriculture Charlie McConalogue is to make sure the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) “works the way it should work” for next year.

“I want it to be a positive experience for every farmer. By and large for most farmers who participated in ACRES, it’s been a pretty positive experience at farm level.

“There’s been some challenges in relation to the scores, on commonage in particular, and that’s something I’m assessing further too, because I want it to work well for everyone involved,” he said on the Irish Farmers Journal stand at Ploughing 2024.

He said that he wants to make sure that the challenges associated with year one are limited for year two and that the scheme can progress in the way that other schemes did last year.

“We met our payment deadlines last year for other schemes - that has to be the case for ACRES this year too,” he said.

The Minister said that advance payments for year two of the scheme are due to be paid by the end of November.

Challenging

“It is the biggest scheme and the most challenging one administratively because of the change to results-based schemes in this CAP.

“That was a requirement on us and that has proved challenging from an administrative point of view. I do not want any of that, we have to resolve all of that, because it has been a challenge for those farmers who are waiting on payments,” he said.

Minister McConalogue said that he “stepped in” earlier this year to make sure all farmers were issued with an interim payment of either €4,000 or €5,000 if they hadn’t already got their advance at the end of last year.

He said 82% of farmers have now received their balancing payment and this figure will rise to 95% by the end of this month.