Crop diversification: a reminder that crop diversification rules remain in place. If you have less than 10ha you do not need to do anything.

If you have 10-30ha of crops then you must grow two crops and one crop should not be more than 75% of the area.

If you have 30ha or more then you need to grow at least three crops. The main crop cannot take up more than 75% of the area and the two main crops cannot take up more than 95% of the area.

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A change this year is that growers with holdings of less than 30ha will not be penalised if they fail to comply with the two-crop rule. However, this may not help many people as the holding has to be 30ha.

So, if you have a holding that is 35ha and you have 29ha of crops and 6ha of grass then you must still comply with crop diversification requirements.

Growers can also avoid growing a number of crops if they adhere to equivalence, which means planting half of the total crop area in catch crops. This has to continue throughout the CAP, so you should discuss it with your adviser to make sure that you are compliant.

Catch crops grown for equivalence cannot be part of ACRES or grown for the Farming for Water programme.

Rotation: you do not need to comply with crop rotation requirements under CAP unless you have opted into those requirements.

Recommended lists: on the tillage pages this week, 30-31, we detail the recommended lists. Take a look through the lists and choose varieties suitable to your farm. Think about location for diseases and machinery available to get crops cut or final markets like malting barley or straw.

Slurry: slurry spreading has been allowed in zone A of the country since Tuesday, 13 January, zone B is from Friday, 16 January and Zone C is 1 February. Just because slurry can be spread from this time it doesn’t mean it should be.

Try and apply slurry as close to planting a crop as possible and try and avoid spreading when heavy rain is forecast.

You should be cultivating or ploughing that slurry into the ground as quickly as possible for best results. If you have a trailing show then you do not need to do this. If your grassland stocking rate is higher than 100kg/ha then you must incorporate slurry into the ground within 24 hours of spreading.

Artificial fertiliser nitrogen or phosphorus products cannot be applied until 27 January in Zone A, 30 January in Zone B and 15 February in zone C.

If you apply slurry or urea to land then you can spread lime after about 10 days, but if you apply lime to land then you should not apply slurry or urea for about three months. Lime and potassium can be spread at any time.

Payments: check your agfood.ie account to see what payments have been made and that all are up-to-date. Some protein and SIM payments are still to come through.