Sheep/beef welfare schemes open in months

The Beef Welfare Scheme is expected to open at the end of July, while a new Sheep Welfare Scheme will open in early April.

Officials from the Department of Agriculture told a recent Agricultural Consultants Association (ACA) conference that payments for the Beef Welfare Scheme should be made by the year end.

While the terms and conditions of the scheme, which has funding of €20m, are not finalised, it is hoped meal-feeding would be retained as a measure while the Department’s officials confirmed farmers can be in either the SCEP or the Beef Welfare Scheme, or both together.

The 17,000 farmers in SCEP will have to complete training later this year. They will receive notification this month ahead of its launch in April.

The training will take place online, with seven modules for farmers to complete, one of which is on farm safety.

The Department officials said they are aware that older farmers or people with broadband issues may have difficulties doing the training online and it would consider providing some in-person training.

The new Sheep Welfare Scheme, set to open in early April, has a budget of €15m and will see sheep farmers receive a payment of €8/ewe.

To receive the payment, farmers will have to do two actions — expected to be either shearing or body condition scoring of ewes and either vaccination or plunge dipping of ewes.

Eligible

The potential payment number of ewes will be the average of the census of 2020, 2021 and 2022. Farmers who did not have ewes on at least one of these dates will not be eligible for the scheme.

With ACRES, which now has 55,000 farmers, the Area Monitoring System (AMS) will be used to check extensively grazed pasture is not moved before July 1, as well as wild bird cover.

Department officials stated they are seeing non-compliance with farmers not putting wild bird cover in or the plot is not suitable.

A small number of ACRES tranche 1 payments are still outstanding, the Department of Agriculture officials told the Agricultural Consultants Association AGM last week.

Another payment run is expected to be made by the Department this week.