A number of people have queried our piece last week on the distribution of CAP payments across the UK regions, and why the average payment in NI is so far behind others.

In NI, the average comes to slightly over £12,000 per farm, compared to £15,262 in Wales, £21,938 in England and £26,808 in Scotland. In addition, Scottish farmers still get less favoured area payments, worth an average of £4,739 per farm, and have secured an extra £160m from the British government to correct an historic issue around how CAP payments were distributed in 2015. Clearly the system of area-based payments suits the Scottish, and with 5.6m ha of agricultural land, and only 18,058 CAP claimants, average farm size is around 310ha. That compares to 87ha in England, and 48ha and 41ha in Wales and NI respectively.

It should be pointed out that the Scottish figure is inflated by a number of very large landowners, with 9% of holdings accounting for 76% of the land area.

However, it is the variation in farm size across the UK that drives the difference in payments.

From a farmer perspective, many would probably argue that CAP money should be distributed on the basis of agricultural output, not land area.

Looking at UK agricultural output over the last eight years, the data would suggest that this would benefit English farmers at the expense of the rest. English farmers receive 65.5% of CAP payments, but produce 74.2% of total UK output, so if payments were based on what was produced, farmers there would get a 13% increase. In NI, we produce 7.6% of UK output, but receive a 9.17% share of CAP money, so it would be a 17% reduction. However, it is farmers in Wales and Scotland who would lose the most, and payments based on output would see their share of the UK pot cut by 32% and 26% respectively.

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