Agri-environmental schemes have faced criticism from farmers who say they are too prescriptive, and environmentalists who say they don’t deliver.

Farmers want to be properly paid for their efforts, while European taxpayers want greater returns from the estimated €13bn spent annually protecting biodiversity.

In Ireland, it is 25 years since the first agri-environmental scheme, in the form of REPS, was introduced.

Its successors, AEOS and GLAS, are examples of management-based schemes. Farmers are given a list of actions to undertake and payments are based on the cost of completing the action, and the income foregone by doing so.

Results-based payment schemes are emerging as the alternative. Through these, farmers are paid for what they deliver, as opposed to how they deliver it.

Taking the wild bird cover action in GLAS as an example, it was designed to provide a winter feed source for farmland birds.

Farmers are currently paid a set amount, based on the cost of sowing the crop, along with compensation for the area taken out of production.

Under a results-based model, farmers would instead be paid for the quantity of bird food produced, with crops producing more feed paid at a higher rate.