At what stage do you not bother with sfp?

yosemitesam1

An article in Irish times yesterday saying farms receiving payments should have 20% of land devoted to nature. Probably would be ways around it through multi species swards etc.
Bass reeves mentioned tightening of nitrates limits also.
But what % drop in production would you take before saying f**k it?


Beef here, so will pretty much do what they want, unlikely to be a burden here anyway.

TooOldBoots

The SFP is all there is out of beef farming, most are getting to the stage of just collecting the payments and saying f**k it to the beef.

wrangler

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

An article in Irish times yesterday saying farms receiving payments should have 20% of land devoted to nature. Probably would be ways around it through multi species swards etc.
Bass reeves mentioned tightening of nitrates limits also.
But what % drop in production would you take before saying f**k it?


Beef here, so will pretty much do what they want, unlikely to be a burden here anyway.

Is a lot of good farming practise not legislation now anyway, One of our advisers has gone over to advising farmers how to deal with whats coming down the road regarding water quality, He says himself he's the carrot, and the stick will be along shortly They're finding everything in rivers, slurry, dock spray, MCPA, Nitrates Phosphorous, and of course town sewerage

Gawddawggonnit

yosemitesam1 wrote: »

An article in Irish times yesterday saying farms receiving payments should have 20% of land devoted to nature. Probably would be ways around it through multi species swards etc.
Bass reeves mentioned tightening of nitrates limits also.
But what % drop in production would you take before saying f**k it?


Beef here, so will pretty much do what they want, unlikely to be a burden here anyway.

Thing about regs, whether imposed by national gov or the Eu, is that they’re a moving goalpost. Political whims can make for huge changes on individual farms...
A farmer called last evening that has 37ha of good land. He’s got 2chicken houses of 1000sqm each. With the new regs he’s got to have 64ha per chicken house to spread the litter...that’s fairly severe.
If they can’t get at you with sfp I presume they’ll come at you through the courts?

I’ll be doing exactly as I’m told to hold onto my sfp.

K.G.

funnily enough starting to think about dumping ours.the only thing is between sfp and two.other outside sources of income i have my repayments every year no matter if i make a complete balls of farming

_Brian

Maybe lads on awful small payments won’t bother but vast majority will do whatever is needed.

Albert Johnson

I can't see forfeiting payments being an option for the majority of farmers. Perhaps for lads on certain ends of the spectrum it may be feasible but many operators are highly dependent upon them. In my own case I'm not solely reliant on the farm for an income and have a fairly small payment with little chance of any major increase. I would most definitely miss the money if it stopped coming in but I could certainly live and farm without it if necessary. There are other situations where the payments could be managed without for a range of reasons but I still believe these are in the minority.

As much as I long for the freedom of being able to enact my own policies without the ever looming threat of financial punishment it would hardly be that straight forward in real life. The subsidies exist for a range of reasons and I believe that a carrot approach to maintaining standards is one such reason. The current stick approach would be imposing fines upon such payments. If the event of payments being discontinued or otherwise unclaimed then a different method of rule enforcement would be needed. This would possible be in the form of increased legislation and corresponding penalties to encourage compliance. At the moment I believe that being payed to follow procedure is preferable to unpayed enforcement.