The Green, Low Carbon, Agri-environmental Scheme (GLAS) will be initially judged by the amount of farmers that take it up on the first tranche, according to the Department of Agriculture.

The target is still to get 30,000 farmers to join before the deadline (now set at 22 May), and 50,000 in total.

Department officials told the Irish Farmers Journal this week that the real benefits of the scheme will only be seen when farmers start implementing the individual actions.

“GLAS is unlike REPS and AEOS in that it is much more tightly targeted. It is aimed at tackling three main issues – biodiversity, water quality and climate change,” the Department said.

“It is more than measuring the metres of new hedges that have been laid. We are starting a baseline study shortly which we will follow over the five years to show what improvements the overall scheme will make in the targeted areas.”

GLAS has hit a few bumps after its long-awaited opening was announced in late February. What was the holdup in getting it through the EU?

“The scheme has not changed much from the one we submitted last July. The biggest effort it seems from the start was persuading the EU Commission that we had got the balance right and in the end they all agreed,” the Department said.

The Commission initially had difficulty seeing how Ireland could implement such a broadly based scheme without compromising its environmental objectives.

However, Ireland argued that a high participation rate was key to its strategy, given the size of Irish farms and the potential for delivering a real change in attitudes over the period of the RDP.

Endangered birds

The scheme had to be adapted to focus more on endangered birds and give farmers looking after large areas of these habitats a chance to get higher payment (an additional 2,000) under GLAS+. The rules of commonages were also altered to ensure farmers who joined after the first year could qualify for the full five-year payments. The wheels of decision-making move slowly in Brussels, so the Minister elected to open the scheme in February out of necessity. This has given time for the scheme and accompanying online system to bed in.

The Department said: “It is a completely new scheme with a new online system, so of course there were going to be issues. However, we have been improving the system and continue to take feedback on board to make it easier for advisers.

“The letter of comfort for the Rural Development Plan finally allows the scheme to be officially opened for applications. What this means is we will activate the submit button on the online system in the next week or so to allow advisers to take the final step in the process. Up to now, [applications] were just started by advisers.

“We have 14,000 applications started but of those nearly 10,000 have progressed to actively selecting actions, indicating that they are seriously looking at the option to join.”

The scheme clearly favours farmers who are in commonages or other areas that grant priority Tier 1 access and all but automatic entry this time around.

Other farmers can boost their chances by what they select under the scheme. The Department has made clear what it wants in the four actions that will get farmers priority status under Tier 1 and Tier 2 – actions like low-emission slurry spreading deliver real environmental benefits but are virtually unused in Ireland.

The danger for advisers is that if the first tranche is oversubscribed, farmers in Tier 3, the lowest priority, might fail to get in. This happened under AEOS, which left many farmers annoyed, not to mention advisers out of pocket.

The Department has talked about a matrix of how it will select the successful farmers in the event of the scheme being oversubscribed.

“We will have the matrix completed before we allow any farmer to join. This way advisers can change the plans to give these farmers a better chance of getting into GLAS this time around,” the Department said.

Different emphasis

There could be a different emphasis on the second tranche depending on the actions farmers choose.

This is because the Department has set out targets to the EU under the scheme. For example, if not enough farmers choose low-emissions slurry spreading, they could make this action a higher priority next time round.

The Minister has signalled that there will be a second round under GLAS, but has not announced when. Presumably this is to include as many farmers as possible. The way is being cleared for farmers in REPS and AOES to finish their contracts in December and move into GLAS from 1 January 2016. In such cases, farmers will not lose out on their capital investments, which were supposed to be repaid over the contract. Any remaining balance will be paid out in one final payment.

The farmers who would be able to gain most by an early announcement are those who want to split parcels in their 2015 Basic Payment Scheme application to set themselves up to maximise GLAS payments in the next tranche. “We are seeing very low numbers of farmers who are badly affected as most have the option of splitting a parcel for up to three area-based actions this year,” said the Department.

It is hoping that the new GLAS online system will not only make application easier, but greatly reduce the risk of penalties.

“We have built-in validations that will not allow advisers to submit without cross-checking and ensuring the right actions and areas are put in. The fact that everyone is working off the same map system reduced the risk of getting the area wrong, a problem in both REPS and AOES. It is not in our interest to see farmers suffer penalties,” said Department officials.

The biggest challenge is to ensure farmers complete the actions they have committed to over the contract. The online system will speed up processing and make payment faster as well.

Commonages

The Department remains confident that it will get between 13,000 and 14,000 commonage farmers to join under Tier 1. This would account for up to 45% of farmers in the first tranche.

“Commonage was the thorniest issue early on but a lot of the problems identified have been resolved. We took the decision early on to pay on utilisable agricultural area (UAA) and non-UAA land as we felt it is a unique landscape that has to be managed. The advisers have been trained and will be approved shortly.”

In the event of farmers not being able to decide on a planner, the commonage implementation committee will pick one for them.

The Department has already seen 100 commonage management plans (CMPs) submitted. It has finalised the approval process and is sending it out this week. When asked about the 3 July deadline for CMPs, it said it would be loath to move the 3 July deadline to submit plans as it cannot approve any GLAS plan until everyone is evaluated.

“If we let the CMP deadline creep to the middle of July, it will delay the ranking of every plan, delaying approval and payment.”