Green Acres was a popular TV show in the 1960s. It featured Eddie Albert as a US attorney who gave up on the rat-race and bought a farm in the rural idyll of Hooterville.

This was much to the ire of his glamorous socialite wife, played by Eva Gabor – who spent her life in the shadow of her sister Zsa Zsa.

Both women were married a number of times, but I’ll come back to that later.

ACRES, the new “green” agri-environmental scheme, is already suffering in the shadows of REPS. And let’s be honest, it can never be REPS, for two simple reasons.

Trailblazer

As the first agri-environmental scheme anywhere in the EU, REPS was a trailblazer in the early 1990s. It paid farmers for pretty simple actions, the low-hanging fruit. Gates were hung, yards tidied up, margins widened, hedges planted or coppiced.

Like a teenage romance, nothing can ever be as innocent again. Which brings us to the second challenge for ACRES. As the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions (GAEC) are stiffened up to reduce farming’s footprint, more and more actions become mandatory. And there’s a rule that you can’t have an incentivisation for a mandatory action.

The good news is that ACRES will run parallel to the Pillar I eco schemes, so there are two payments farmers can access.

The bad news is that eco schemes will be funded by money that has been taken from farmers’ payment pots, the current Greening payment. And eco-scheme measures can’t be replicated in ACRES.

Results-based

All that said, if ACRES is a results-based scheme as promised, all those farmers who are and have been working hard to make their farms a good environment for both farmed animals and for nature should be rewarded for their efforts. And farmers have always been good to learn from each other and adopt good practice.

ACRES needs an effective leader/follower mechanism, where farms that have cracked the balance between productivity and biodiversity become learning centres.

It was Zsa Zsa Gabor who said: “I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.” Farmers mightn’t like ACRES as it unfolds, but they will still want the money it provides. Many will need it.

We might pine for REPS, the scheme that got away, but as the song put it “if you’re not with the one you love, love the one you’re with”.