The introduction of the protein aid scheme in 2015 provides a €3m fund to support the production of protein crops in Ireland. It was planned around the production of 12,000ha of a combination of three protein crops – fields beans, peas and lupins combined – to provide a coupled support of €250/ha.

The scheme can only be regarded as having been very successful, with crop area increasing from an average of around 3,500ha in the years preceding its introduction in 2015 to rise to 10,700ha in year one of the new scheme (see Figure 1).

The scheme commits to spend the annual fund so that in years when fewer acres are claimed than the threshold the fund is divided by the smaller area to give a higher per hectare payment. The converse is also true as the area exceeded 12,000ha in 2016 and 2017 and this resulted in a lower per-hectare payment to growers in those years.

The direct payment support was highly instrumental in increasing the area grown, as shown in Figure 1.

This coupled payment adds significantly to the economics of these crops, adding more than 1t/ha to the equivalent gross output from the crops.

And even with this many growers still do not consider these crops worthwhile as evidenced by the lower provisional planted area in 2019. Without this aid, these crops could be far less attractive in much of the country and it seems likely that area would back to their historic levels or even lower.