Farmers will have the ability to choose their historical reference period for the Suckler Carbon Efficiency Programme.

The maximum number of cows a farmer can be paid on will be based on the average of the numbers of cows calved down in a herd from a combination of any three years in the period from 2016 to 2021.

Speaking at the Department of Agriculture CAP information meeting in Rosscarbery on Thursday night, Peter Harte from the Department said: “With the new scheme, what we plan on doing is; the application will be done online and when a farmer logs in they will be presented with the historic data from 2016 to 2021 on the number of suckler cows that calved down in those years.

“From that, they will pick three years and we will devise an average for those three years and which we will then divide by 1.5 for the maximum payable area. That becomes the maximum scheme reference figure,” he said.

There is much more flexibility around the reference years compared to Beef Data and Genomics Programme (BDGP) where 2014 was the set reference year for all participants in the initial run of the scheme.

The three years don’t have to be consecutive and if a farmer calved cows in only two years in that period, then the reference will be an average of those two years.

Circumstances

If a farmer’s circumstances change in a given year, the option is there to revise the maximum figure downwards.

When applying each year, a farmer will have the ability to change the reference figure. For example if they lost leased land for a year they could reduce the figure and the option is there to increase the maximum reference figure if more land became available again.

“This flexibility allows farmers to meet the requirements of the scheme without penalty,” Harte said.