The number of farmers taking part in the current Knowledge Transfer (KT) programme has plummeted by more than half compared to the last CAP.

Just over 7,600 farmers are taking part in the new scheme which runs until 2026, the Department of Agriculture has said.

When the scheme was last run between 2017 and 2019, over 18,000 farmers took part.

As part of the scheme, farmers must attend eight group meetings and, now, a new element of the scheme involves a one-to-one meeting between the farmer and their adviser.

Previously, advisers could only carry out two one-to-one meetings per day, lasting two hours each, and those meetings could only be with farmers from the same KT group.

The objective of the scheme is to upskill farmers and to “foster knowledge exchange and innovation” between advisers and farmers.

Each KT group can have a maximum of 20 farmers.

Roscommon-based adviser Noel Feeney said there are two reasons why he didn’t take on any KT groups this time. “One is because of the amount of admin required of advisers before you ever sit down with a farmer and the second reason is because the money hasn’t changed for either me or the farmers.

“The last time, I did five groups and I thoroughly enjoyed the meetings with farmers, and they enjoyed the extra information and the different chats too. However, I hadn’t one client ask me this time round why I wasn’t doing them,” he said.

Payment

For each year of the KT programme, farmers receive a re-imbursement to the amount of €750 where all the requirements of the scheme have been met.

Facilitators will receive €500/year for each participant in their group(s) where all the requirements of the programme have been met.