Livestock farmers who applied for the free soil sampling and analysis scheme funded under NI’s £4.1m share of the EU Exceptional Adjustment Aid (EAA) package are to be notified by AFBI over the coming days if their application was successful or not.

Around 600 of the 3,000 applications received have been successful and will have soil samples taken over a 12-week period from late November 2017.

Successful applicants must check field information enclosed in offer letters and contact AFBI within 14 days to accept the offer on to the scheme.

Soil samples from 20,000 fields will be collected in two elements of the scheme. An “open scheme” is for all livestock farmers in NI, and a “catchment scheme” is for farmers within specific areas of the Upper Bann river catchment.

Last month, AFBI received about 3,000 applications from farmers, covering around 80,000 fields. Most were applying to the open scheme.

The original plan was for 10,000 field samples for each element of the scheme, but that has now changed slightly, with an extra 2,000 samples allocated to the open scheme.

A DAERA spokesperson highlighted that the scheme links closely with the John Gilliland-led Sustainable Agriculture Land Management Report published in October 2016. “The EAA funding has provided an opportunity to pilot an approach to the recommendations on soil testing and the department intends to evaluate the outcomes of the scheme in 2018,” they said.