Young trained farmers are eyeing up entering the basic payment top-up scheme this year with some caution .

Signing up for the current scheme might backfire if it locks people out of a better scheme that might emerge in the next CAP.

Against that, the clock is ticking, with farmers eating into the years that they are classified as new entrants. Nobody wants to create a new cohort of what have become known as the “forgotten farmers”.

There have to be limitations to the young farmer incentives. The idea that all farmers under 40 would be permanently eligible for benefits doesn’t stack up at all. A young man or woman could be qualified and farming by the age of 20, giving them 20 years of access to such schemes.

Apart from the enormous cost this would impose on the public purse, it would discriminate against those farmers over the age of 40 who never got such opportunities.

Limits

So accepting limits are needed, how do we prevent the “cliff-edge” that Macra president Thomas Duffy speaks of? Perhaps a sliding scale, where farmers are given progressively lower “top-ups” over their first 10 years of farming, would work?

There is also a need to somehow prioritise those farmers in more difficult circumstances.

Young farmers on poorer land could receive a top-up from the ANC or the “new REPS” agri-environmental scheme. Sheep and cattle farmers could receive higher ewe maintenance or BGDP payments. Ensuring or assisting access to finance to co-fund TAMS investments would also help.

In terms of entitlements, there is something that doesn’t sit well with many people about the son or daughter of a large well-established farmer gaining entitlements as a new entrant if they are destined to inherit the home farm and its entitlements in time. Could some form of clawback be organised in such cases, freeing up resources for those farmers who don’t have that opportunity?

Of course, the national reserve can only allocate meaningful entitlements to new entrants if there is a constant inflow. The allocation of €6m over the next two years is only a temporary fix to an ongoing problem.

Ridiculous

As we approach 20 years of the single/basic payment scheme, it is ridiculous that people are able to lease and release the entitlements with land and retain them. A lease and buy or lease and surrender of some or all entitlements is overdue. The noises the IFA is making suggests it would back such an initiative this time.

However, its constant insistence on upward-only convergence suggests it will want that money to go towards increasing lower entitlements, rather than creating new ones from within the national reserve.