Greening ‘Simplification’

The EU Commission’s plans to simplify the Greening rules look set to disappoint many who hoped for a radical change. The draft proposals currently being drawn up a largely technical changes on the detailed rules.  There is no intention of revisiting the Basic Acts so something like the scrapping, or even the altering the thresholds, for Crop Diversification is not on the agenda.  The plans comprise fifteen measures.  Not all of them would be regarded by farmers as simplification.  For example, one of the proposals is to prohibit the use of pesticides on all EFA land.  This means protein crops being counted towards the 5% requirement could not have the normal agrochemical inputs.  Other ideas being floated include changing the weighting factors for EFA, amending the qualifying rules for some landscape features, removing the deadlines for sowing catch and cover crops and allowing flexibility in the Crop Diversification cropping period.  All these changes would apply for the 2017 BPS onwards.