Progress has been made with amending proposals under the Nutrients Action Programme (NAP), the deputy president of the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU) has said.

Speaking to UFU members in Coleraine last week, John McLenaghan gave an update on a stakeholder group which is currently reviewing proposed water quality rules for NI farms.

The group was set up by Agriculture Minister Andrew Muir after a public consultation on a revised NAP in May 2025 received an angry response from the NI agri food industry.

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“I believe progress is being made but nothing is finalised yet. We will continue to work in conjunction with the other partners in the room to get something that is workable,” he said.

McLenaghan said the stakeholder group has been assigning traffic light colours to the 41 proposals that were contained in the original NAP consultation.

“Something like 38 of them started red, but we are working our way through that process and quite a number of those measures are now green,” he said.

“That means we are happy and we have moved away from the problem that we saw initially to something that we believe is workable at farm level,” he said.

The NAP stakeholder group is made up of representatives from farming, industry and environmental groups, as well as DAERA officials.

McLenaghan said some NAP measures remain amber and red, but he is hopeful that the review could be completed by the group so new proposals could be sent to Minister Muir.

After that, the plan is that the minister will consider the revised NAP proposals and another public consultation will be held for an eight-week period.

Legal challenge

The UFU and other agri food groups started legal proceedings over the original NAP consultation in June 2025, but it was put on hold when Minister Muir announced plans for the stakeholder group and a second consultation.

However, McLenaghan suggested that a legal challenge could re-emerge if the proposals put forward by the stakeholder group are not taken forward by the minister.

“If he doesn’t adopt the measures that are proposed, we would probably go back to legal aspect of it again at that point,” he said.

At the same time, the UFU deputy president acknowledged that DAERA could also face legal proceedings from environmental groups who think NAP proposals do not go far enough.

“The extremes on the environmental side quite frankly want to see decimation of livestock farming in NI because they believe that’s where all the problems are,” he said.

McLenaghan described this as “one of the two major threats” that is facing the current process of reviewing and amending the NAP proposals.

He said the other threat comes from “the other extreme on the farmer side” where the argument is that farm groups should not be engaging with DAERA at all.

“The belief that we have no responsibility in this area is a threat to process as it is not a justifiable position. We have a responsibility but it has to be fair and equitable to us as farmers.

“There is an opportunity in this to farm more efficiently, and that will be better for the environment as well,” McLenaghan said.