As farmers attempt to come to grips with dotting the Is and crossing the Ts for their farm features and ecological focus areas (EFA), the extent of this online task has become even more daunting.

Interactive speed with the internet is suggested as being one of the most frustrating aspects, with things like screen refreshing times being a challenge to those who have a lot of alterations and adjustments to make. And this is progressively more frustrating on big acreages.

At the series of meetings organised by Teagasc in conjunction with the Department at the end of October, it was stated that around 9,500 farmers will be subject to some aspect of greening, based on the applications submitted in 2014.

While the details submitted in 2015 may be different, and may be altered by some applicants to avoid greening via some of the derogations, there will still be a lot of applications to be dealt with for greening.

At the meeting in Meath, Teagasc’s Ivan Whitten outlined the workings of a greening calculator that Teagasc was developing at the time.

This simple tool has since been made available to all who attended these events and they enable individuals to look at the make-up of their farm areas for 2015. It is simple to use and Ivan described it as a very useful tool to “mess around with”.

This is to be recommended. While thinking about your 2015 application, one can enter different areas of a range of crops to see what combinations will satisfy the crop diversification requirement. It will then tell you the total area of EFA needed, based on the area and crop make-up submitted.

The most obvious consequence is that by increasing the area in temporary grass, one can become immune from all greening requirements.

The calculator works out your EFA requirement based on the crop areas submitted. However, it is important to note that it does not attempt to calculate and deduct the area provided by the crops/land uses declared, such as fallow, protein or cover crops.

Example

A simple screenshot of the calculator is shown in Figure 1. All one has to do is enter the relevant areas of the different crops/land uses. In this example, I have entered 12ha of permanent pasture, along with 4ha of temporary grass.

The crops area is 84ha (cereals, maize, linseed, etc) plus four hectares of fallow and six hectares of protein crops. So the total area submitted was 110ha and this includes the 12ha of permanent grassland.

Firstly, the area of grass (permanent and temporary) plus other non-greening crops (forage and fallow) is 12+4+0+4 or 20ha. This is 18.18% of the total application area, so there is a greening obligation. This is clearly stated in the dark green boxes around the middle of Figure 1.

If the percentage above works out at 75% or greater (and there is <30ha crops), then the dark green disappears and the text reads “no greening required”.

At the same time, the EFA area boxes become empty because the details of the application mean that no greening is required.

However, in the example in Figure 1, the total area is 110ha, with 98ha of arable crops (cereals, temporary grass, fallow and protein). This is then the figure used to calculate the EFA requirement which, at the 5% rate, works out at 4.9ha minimum.

This area must then be provided through some combination of hedges, ditches, buffer zone and crops, such as protein, or land declared as fallow.

In this example, the 6ha of protein crop would provide 4.2ha of EFA, so this farmer would only need an additional 0.7ha to come from hedges, ditches and other farm features. But the 4ha of fallow also provides 4ha of EFA, so this applicant would not need to use any of his farm features for EFA.

The major benefit of using the Teagasc calculator is that it enables one to play around with different combinations of crops in a simple and convenient manner.

For applicants with mainly grass and some tillage, it is an easy way to check where the thresholds are and how they apply. But you need to be aware of all of the different derogations that apply for both crop diversification and EFA, as the calculator does not attempt to incorporate all of these.

Nor does it show what is needed where only two crops are required for applicants with between 10ha and 29.9ha.

In these instances, where crop diversification is required, the calculator will still give a value for “the two largest crops should not be more than”, with a calculated area that does not apply where only two crops are required.

Watch those thresholds

Also speaking at that information meeting, Shay Phelan of Teagasc warned about the need to keep clear of the thresholds used for the different calculations.

Where one is to avail of the 75+% grassland, with less than 30ha of crops, then you need to have the areas correct. If there was to be any slight adjustment to either the area of grassland or the area of crops during an inspection, one could be tipped either side of a critical threshold with consequential penalties. “This situation must be avoided,” Shay warned.

The same applies to the area thresholds for the main crop and two main crop areas. Make sure you have some breathing space on the right side of all of these thresholds.

Shay also said that land use as fallow is likely to be important for 2015 given that seed will be scarce for protein crops and many farmers had planned to use beans to provide some EFA.

But using fallow will provide more EFA than a protein crop, as fallow is one for one as EFA hectares, while protein crops only provide 0.7ha EFA per hectare of protein crop.

While catch crops may be appealing to some farmers to provide EFA, Shay warned that this is not feasible on land that is genuine conacre – that is you do not have a roll-over arrangement with that land owner. You must be sure to have access to the land until after the end of the green cover period, which is 15 January.

Temporary grass has become more interesting as a crop option on mixed farms. It can be declared both as fallow – to provide EFA – and as a crop. Declared just as temporary grass, it only provides a crop. And declaring temporary grass as fallow freezes its path to becoming permanent pasture.