Around 3,000 farm businesses in NI are understood to be in receipt of a letter from DARD querying if they are operationally separate. They were identified in checks by DARD as having associated herds or flocks on APHIS, which are registered against two or more businesses submitting a 2015 Single Application Form (SAF).

The position of the Department is that each farm business completing the SAF in 2015 must be independent with separate handling facilities, buildings, machinery, etc.

The focus on the issue has come about after some farmers realised that there was a windfall to be had from splitting their existing business, consolidating payments on to a smaller land area and allowing another family member (young farmer or new entrant) to avail of a claim to the regional reserve (and go straight to the NI average estimated at €329/ha). With the regional reserve funded out of the total subsidy pot, the more money required to fund the reserve, the less there is for everyone else.

To help prevent an artificial split of a farm business to avail of more subsidies, DARD has insisted on separateness. However, it means that some genuine farm businesses, perhaps where two brothers own separate land blocks, but farm together to get efficiencies of scale, have been caught in the crossfire.

The advice for those who have received a letter is not to ignore it, but to respond within the three-week deadline. Sources maintain that DARD is highly unlikely to be sympathetic to anyone trying to maintain the status quo – unless both parties are clearly farming separately they should consider merging the businesses together.

This means that the Department will allocate the new business with a single business identification number and all subsidy payments will be channelled through that route. But the line from DARD officials is that they have no interest in what happens after that – if two sole traders want to continue to have separate accounts in an arrangement that sits underneath the overall farm business, they can do so. It is then a matter of allocating the relevant subsidy payment to each.

That is more complicated where the two parties start with different amounts of land and different initial entitlement values. When they are merged together by DARD into one initial entitlement value, who gets what over the next seven years? However, as long as records are kept of initial entitlement values, and once the NI average is known, it is a calculation that should be reasonably straightforward each year.