Given the amount of money in the Organic Farming Scheme, farmers “would be mad not to look” into getting involved in the scheme, Fran Morrin of the Department of Agriculture has said.

He told an Irish Farmers Journal CAP meeting in Tuam, Co Galway, on Wednesday night that the scheme has the same amount of money as the Areas of Natural Constraint (ANC).

"If you are in the organic farming system you have priority access to ACRES. You’ll also have a higher TAMS rate as well and the scheme is currently open for applications too.

“It’s worth looking at some of those payment rates. There’s a high payment rate in the first two years because at that point you’re converting over to organic but you can’t sell as organic because you haven’t fully converted over,” he said.

It is a five-year scheme, but Morrin said that he couldn’t imagine that there wouldn’t be support for organic farming going beyond 2027.

“Look, it’s probably not for everyone, but having said that 90% of you out there are probably 90% organic anyway or that close to it. Given the amount of money that’s there, putting it bluntly you might decide that it’s not for you but you’d be mad not to look at it at least.”

Circumvention

Morrin added that there will be an increased focus in the new CAP on circumvention.

“That’s something that’s been driven politically and by all of the audit teams throughout Europe.

“What is it? It’s where artificially the conditions are created to draw down benefit or you could call it ‘getting around the rules’.

“There’s a point of fairness in this for all farmers because if farmer A is sitting here and is obeying all the rules and is doing the thing right and farmer B is riding roughshod and chancing their arm, that is not a fair thing. Farmer A is doing it right and farmer B is flouting the law. That’s not fair on anybody," he said.

Examples of this include splitting herds to avoid capping, selling entitlements off land purely just to create naked land to draw down money from the national reserve and applications to the Young Farmer Scheme when they are not the ones actually farming with managerial control and financial control of the farm, he said.

“The reality is there will be significant penalty risks for the farmer in question, but also for the adviser,” he said.