N. Ireland CAP Plans

Farmers in Northern Ireland will have seven years to adjust to a regional payment system, and there will only be one region within the province.  These CAP implementation decisions were announced by the Northern Ireland Executive on the 26^th June.  Some other key features of the system will be a re-grant of entitlements in 2015, there will be an absolute cap on the level of direct payments at €150,000, the minimum claim size will be 3 hectares, and there will be no use of top-up schemes such as the Redistributive payment, Small Farmers scheme, AwNC scheme or Coupled payments.  There will be a payment to farmers in the SDA under Pillar 2 for the 2015 and 2016 years.  More details can be found at – http://www.dardni.gov.uk/cap-decisions-to-date-summary-26-june-2014.pdf