This is a subscriber-only article
Farmers in NI continue to achieve a high conformity rate in cross compliance inspections, figures obtained by the Irish Farmers Journal confirm.
There were no breaches for 11 of the 20 cross-compliance standards on any of the 1,419 farms that were inspected last year.
The two main issues that led to fines continue to relate to rules around cattle tags and nitrates.
Of the 637 farms that were inspected for the Statutory Management Requirement on cattle identification and registration (SMR7), 183 received penalties.
However, only 7% of the farms were randomly selected for inspection, meaning the remaining 93% were already deemed at a higher risk of being in breach of the rules.
Lost cattle tags is a common issue under SMR7 and farmers are allowed 15% of their herd to have a single missing ear tag before penalties are applied to direct payments. There is no allowance for cattle with both ear tags missing before fines apply.
A similar non-compliance rate of around 29% is seen in SMR1, which relates to the protection of water against nitrates pollution. Again, most of these farms were seen as high risk in the first place, with only 19% of farms randomly selected for inspection.
Non-compliances for SMR1 typically includes slurry spreading during closed periods, and nutrient run-off into waterways.
Figures from DAERA confirm that non-conformity rates for all other cross compliance rules remained low last year.
The data also shows that of the 291 breaches found on NI farms, there was relatively few serious incidents as only 10 penalties were worth more than 15% of the farmer’s direct payment.
The vast majority of penalties equated to less than 5% of direct payments as they were deemed to have been a result of negligence, as opposed to intentional breaches of cross compliance rules.
SHARING OPTIONS: