What do Cristiano Ronaldo, Usain Bolt, Serena Williams and Stephen Cluxton have in common?
Apart from being sporting superstars, that is.
The answer is that they all, at this moment, qualify as young farmers, at least on age grounds.
While Serena and Stephen are nearing the age limit of 40, CR7 at 36 would gain top-up payments for four years.
Usain Bolt, only 35, is young enough to max out the full five years of payments available. It’s not just sportspeople, where younger people excel.
Emmanuel Macron would have qualified as a young farmer when he became the French prime minister.
John Lennon was only 40 when he was killed; everything he created was when he was a technically a young farmer.
Criteria
They would have to fulfil the criteria to be a young trained farmer suitable for top-up payments, of course.
The bar is not that high, it’s a matter of gaining a FETAC Level 6 course in agriculture or higher.
That’s the green cert in old money; a Cluxton kick-out for a bunch as bright as these.
The rewards are significant, or at least they might be, depending on your circumstances.
Entitlements get a top-up worth 25% of the national average. That is currently worth €65/ha up to a limit of 50ha, a maximum top-up of €3,250/year.
Level of support
Of course, a young farmer with only 12ha and 12 entitlements will only get €780, so the bigger your holding, the bigger the level of support from this scheme.
Having said that, with the average farm size being 35ha nowadays, the 50ha limit is understandable.
The big question is, does such a payment structure chime with the current CAP proposals? Does a system that rewards farmers with 50ha five times as much as it rewards a farmer with 10ha mesh in with front loading?
What about the focus in this CAP for 1/10th of the €1.2bn of direct payment funding to be redistributed away from larger farms and towards smaller holdings.
How does this type of young farmer support make sense in the light of that key objective?
There’s €24m a year to be allocated to young farmers
We haven’t seen detailed proposals on young farmer payments from the Department of Agriculture yet.
With 2% of all funding set aside, there’s €24m a year to be allocated to young farmers. And it would make sense for it to be allocated toward those that need it most.
There’s an old saying - “from each according to their means, to each according to their needs”.
It is at the heart of socialism, but before anyone checks for reds under my bed, is it not also the thinking behind universal free education and health services?
Whether you hold them to be a reality or an aspiration in Irish society, it’s hard to find many who would argue against that aspiration.
Examples
So let’s for a second apply that maxim to the €24m young farmers fund.
Let’s imagine you are a 39-year-old farmer and you currently have entitlements and land. Let’s take an average-sized farmer, with average payments. So that’s 35ha, and 35 entitlements worth €261 each.
Your total payment pot in 2021 would be €9,135. We must remember that the young farmer scheme currently exists and currently accounts for 2% of Pillar I funds, so the haircut for young farmer payments already exists.
Good reason to begrudge paying any money to this fund
But everything is up for discussion during CAP reform and this farmer would really like to talk about their contribution to this fund.
Let’s call our example Mary Walsh (it’s time I took a woman as an example). Mary has good reason to begrudge paying any money to this fund.
She is a forgotten farmer. She came home in 2005, aged 24, to take over the running of the farm, as her father had fallen into ill-health. She completed the green cert over the next two years.
Just as she was ready to apply for installation aid, the sky fell in on the economy. Her ailing father missed out on the retirement scheme for good measure. She was farming on her own, with little State support.
By the time the Government was in a position to put young farmer supports in place, in 2015, as part of the new CAP, Mary no longer qualified for support, because she had been farming for too long in her own right.
Taking the herd number into her own name to enable her to qualify for the installation aid was now working against her.
Levies
And from 2015 through to this year, 2% of Mary’s payment has been levied to pay other young farmers in the area a top-up on their entitlements. Some of them have entitlements worth much more than Mary’s.
One is milking 100 cows on a second platform to his dad’s 180 cows. He is leasing a neighbour’s farm and, as it was bare land, was granted entitlements to the value of the average in the district electoral division.
These are higher than Mary’s payments. They are given out on up to 90ha. The neighbour got 60 entitlements worth €340 each. For free.
And Mary helped to create the fund the national reserve, as it comes out of Pillar I funds as well.
Contribution
Mary has contributed €5/ha/year of her payment pot to the young farmer fund. That’s €175/year or €875 over the five years.
It mightn’t mean much to some, but for a drystock farmer trying to make a living from the land while acting as the main carer for her now elderly parents, it’s a lot.
Mary would have loved to have leased or rented a bit of extra land, but was outbid by her neighbour, who is a year older than her.
There’s a bit of land across the road she’d love to rent - it might be coming on stream in a year or two, but she isn’t optimistic, because the dairy farmer has a younger brother and he’s coming home after a few years in Australia.
The likelihood is he’ll do just like his brother, rent a farm, claim entitlements from the national reserve and get the top-up for five years. The word is he’ll put 60 cows and a robot on this land and spend most of his time working with his dad.
This might sound like a cherry-picked and unlikely scenario, but it is entirely possible and plausible. Drystock farmers such as Mary are losing out on renting or leasing land to dairy farmers across the country.
And lest anyone thinks I am disparaging the dairy farming family, I am certainly not.
They are simply taking advantage of the opportunities offered by a system they had no hand act or part in designing. Fair play to them.
Mary has no problem with them on a personal level, she’s friendly with them and they have in truth been good neighbours. She uses their scales to weigh her cattle for the BGDP scheme.
But she would be lying if she said she wasn’t a little envious of the advantages the system is granting them. A system that has tied her hands behind her back for the last decade.
Solutions
I don’t know what solutions this conundrum throws up. Should young farmer entitlement top-ups be front-loaded to the first 10 or 20ha? Should there be a sliding scale? Should there be a coupled scheme for young farmers in vulnerable sectors?
There is one thing that is blatantly obvious. Something must be done for the forgotten farmers such as Mary.
Bad timing should not become their permanent burden. There must be some solution. A single installation aid-type payment.
If Brussels won’t fund it, force them to sanction it and do it from national funds.
SHARING OPTIONS: