Questions asked over ear tag compensation
With almost two years of data collection, considerable frustration over the delayed delivery of tissuetesting ear tags and the recent contact to arrange a carbon audit, farmers involved in the Beef Efficiency Scheme have been questioning when they will receive recompense for all their additional work.
However, NFU Scotland yesterday revealed that it believed that farmers and crofters would begin to receive their first BES payment later this month – and urged those in the scheme to press ahead with the carbon audit.
Having been guided through his own carbon audit yesterday, vice-president Martin Kennedy said that the scheme involved the help of an adviser and looked at the business as a whole, rather than simply concentrating on the beef enterprise, with the aim of identifying areas where savings – both financial and environmental – could be made.
Commenting on the exercise to identify routes to reducing his farm’s carbon footprint, Kennedy said:
“It was a positive to have an adviser come to the farm and walk me through the Carbon Audit on the computer.
“Together we looked at the performance of both inputs and outputs and this let me see where I wanted to make a change.”
He said it was important to stress that while the scheme required producers to come up with three management changes to reduce the footprint, achieving them was not mandatory under the scheme – and only one of these steps had to be produced during the Carbon Audit.
“Forexample,icouldproduce a management decision that I want to move to rotational grazing, but if I get a run of awfully wet years that stand in the way of what I want to do there won’t be any blow back on payments through the scheme.” Admitting that he too had been frustrated with the late issuing of ear tags last year, he added that he had been happy with the advisory portion of the scheme.
“I’d encourage members to see this as an opportunity to look at what they’re doing.” l A report published yesterday showed that a similar scheme focusing on saving costs while reducing a farm’s carbon footprint which is currently in operation in Ireland under the “Smart Farming” banner had produced an average on-farm saving of €8,700 (£7,750) while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 10 per cent.