Farmers on the Aran Islands have received in the region of €1,087,000 in direct payments under the Caomhnú Árann scheme since 2019.

The scheme, which officially ends for participating farmers on 31 December 2022, was an EIP-agri operational group co-funded by the Department of Agriculture and the EU.

Caomhnú Árann was a scheme which came from the farmers on the islands themselves, scheme project manager Patrick McGurn said. It built on the work of its predecessor Aran LIFE.

“They got together and said they needed a scheme for the islands. All the works were decided by the farmers,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

The average farm size on Inis Oírr is 9ha, it’s 16ha on Inis Meáin and 21ha on Inis Mór.

“We had 125 farmers in Caomhnú Árann, there’s about 200 farmers on the islands and, again, they’re all quite small. We had good participation in the scheme,” he said.

Intensification is not as big a problem on the islands as it is on the mainland, he said.

The main thing is to keep farmers grazing the land and this was one of the main actions in the scheme. Encroaching scrub in the form of briars and lack of water availability were two issues preventing farmers from doing this.

“You can’t just go in with a tractor here and mulch scrub, it has to be done by hand. Farmers were paid to clear the scrub and then graze the land. We also funded rain catcher tanks.”

Payments

Farmers were paid €635 per rain catcher, up to €600/ha for scrub clearance and a maximum payment of €2,500/year for grazing.

Scrub clearance.

The results-based scoring system was more compacted compared with other schemes. For Caomhnú Árann, the system was based on scores of one to five, compared with one to 10 in other schemes.

A score of three resulted in €100/ha, four resulted in €125/ha and five saw a payment of €150/ha.

As a result of the project, farmers cleared scrub from their land for grazing, resulting in higher scores and, in turn, higher payments.

The scheme “brought farmers back into fields” and this resulted in various grassland species such as orchids and rarer species of grass being established.

Farmers also self-assessed their fields and McGurn said some farmers were almost “shy” in giving themselves five out of five when the scheme organisers would have scored the field as a five.

“There’s no reason we can’t train farmers to score” themselves, he added.

Future

With Caomhnú Árann coming to a close, some farmers who took part in the scheme have applied to the BurrenAran ACRES co-operation project.

“We ran training courses on the islands to encourage farmers into the scheme. It looks to be problematic in the Burren, but our farmers have smaller farm sizes.

“For the general actions in ACRES, the stone wall action is the only option really for the islands. One farmer out here has a 0.6ha field with 600m of stone walls around it,” he said.