Consultants have been paid over £1m to draw up management plans for the Environmental Farming Scheme (EFS), the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.

The higher level of EFS, which is for land in environmentally designated areas, requires farmers to employ an external consultant to survey land and design “site-specific remedial management plans”.

A spokesperson for DAERA confirmed that in the first six tranches of EFS higher level, £1.07m has been paid to planners to help design 1,565 scheme agreements. It equates to an average fee of £684 per management plan.

Across the first six tranches of EFS, higher level agreements were worth £46.89m, which indicates the average annual payment under the five-year scheme was around £6,000.

A seventh tranche of EFS higher level opened for applications in May 2023, and scheme agreements are due to start in January 2024.

DAERA has suggested that a new NI agri environment scheme, which will be known as the Farming With Nature scheme, will have the same three-level structure as EFS.

One part of the scheme will be open to all farmers, another level will be focused on groups of farmers working together in a local area, and the third element will be for individual farmers on high nature value land.

Pilot schemes, as part of Farming With Nature, are due to begin in late 2023 or early 2024. The scheme will not be rolled out in full until 2026.

Funding

However, it remains unclear what role external consultants might have in designing management plans under the new scheme – if the EFS model is replicated, this input could add up to a significant cost.

Unlike EFS, which was funded from the separate ring-fenced Rural Development Programme, the Farming With Nature budget is coming directly from cuts to existing support payments for NI farmers.