My €100m BEAM scheme

For any farmer finishing cattle it was a completely unworkable scheme and I think it probably cost those who complied as much as the gained in the BEAM amount.

I’m sure the scheme suited some, but for the most part, farmers only had from Feb when figures started coming online to take corrective actions. I know it was extended, but again, it was a silly badly thought out scheme.

The stories about charging for sheets of paper and ripping people off is nonsense. I’m sure there are some bad eggs, but because the odd farmer mistreated his animals doesn’t make all farmers cruel.

btw I am the solicitor quoted in the article. :)

While there were plenty of reasons for complaint with the scheme it wasn’t as unworkable as being made out.

The biggest problem was lads looking at their stock numbers and thinking if they normally fatten 100 cattle then they’d reduce to 95 and everything would be ok. But really no one should have been thinking of it in terms of numbers of heads. The scheme was about nitrates figures, not numbers of live animals, so it’s the nitrates figures that needed to be examined.

There are people who have more cattle now than they did in the reference year and they still qualified for the money because they have younger stock now. There are lads that fattened the exact same amount of cattle as always and still get to keep the money because they knew what to do so they killed their stock earlier than normal and bought back slightly younger stock than they normally would.

A simple excel file is all that was needed and it’s a pity either the department or some of the farm organisations didn’t come up with one and send it to farmers or advisors.

I certainly wouldn’t be as tech savvy as a lot of people but I made up an excel file for my own stock, copied over my stock numbers and their dates of birth from Agfood and worked it out from there. Any time I bought or killed cattle they were added in or taken away. The file I made up was slow to use but I could figure it out using it. Anyone with better knowledge of Microsoft than me would have been able to come up with a file where once you put in the date of birth of an animal and the date they arrive on your herd it would have calculated instantly the amount of nitrogen to be produced by that animal until the end of the required period.

Similar then for factory kills or mart sales, put in the date moved from the herd and it would stop counting that animals figures.

Too many people just signed up for the money and then wanted to put in no thought or effort after that and now want to blame everyone else for them having to pay back their money. Lads need to start taking responsibility for themselves and if they want to apply for these schemes then get the finger out and figure out how they work or else just don’t sign up in the first place.

We finish anywhere from 180 cattle up per year. Killed cattle a few weeks earlier last year and didn’t buy any cattle in in March or the first week in April this year and came in well below the 5%.

Killed the same number of cattle last year and this year the same.

It's not really free money. But they worked there heads. It small adjustments to you system to stay under the limit. It was the equivalent to a reduction in 9 cattle. They would have hit the max payment of 10 k. They understand that they could never make that money from within there system on so small a number of stock so they adjusted early.

They did not stick there head in the sand. They put a system in place to allow them get over the line problem is too many lads stick there head in the sand and ass in the air and when they get a massive kick in the hole they complain.

But does the other industries keep doing the same thing and then expect different results?

"if you always do what you always done, you'll always get what you always got."

I'm a small timer but made a handy lump out of beam with no headaches. I let away enough stock last year end at nice money, and bought back in when there was a fortnight lull in prices during late April/early May.

Beam money paid the fertiliser bill and left the other subsidies to go elsewhere.

Glad to be finished with the horrible scheme. Met a 7.5% reduction and still have kept the same stock numbers. Couldn't juggle with purchases as I by in calves. Did it by moving culls earlier and mainly by by finishing half the cattle 2-3 months earlier. A few late last summer and a few earlier this spring. ( Got stung due to Feb price cut)

This scheme had many flaws but my gripe was with the lack of support tools to nearly 33000 farmers. Many still couldn't grasp the concept of nitrates Vs stock numbers. Many farmers already working with nitrates tend to have stable numbers all year ( eg milkers and calves in spring). Compared to the variability of beef farmers sales profile. Big difference in figures of a calf and a 2 yr old bullock being sold 2 weeks later than usual.

Data was not provided in an accessible or timely manner to farmers. This prevented many from being able to make the June 30th deadline and probably was the reasoning for the extension.

Verification of where you stood on a monthly position on was always 6 weeks behind the date.

Semi useful KPI's only started to be received in march this year.

I always get the sense the dept were on the back foot with Beam, due to opening a can of worms that they could not get a handle on

What is with the blaming farmers and apologising for the dept? That attitude is what gets farmers to be at the mercy of everyone. Stop. Please.

I think you are missing the point!

Im certainly not a beam apologist but I cannot understand the mentality of someone who signs up to a scheme knowing the rules from the very start and then complaining at the end of the scheme because they didn’t follow the rules.

Why did you expect to get the money for making absolutely no effort? You’re making a snide comment about designing excel sheets in relation to what I said earlier that I had done. I’m by no means a computer whizz kid, far from it but I put together an excel file in a little over an hour one night. It wasn’t a lot of work to have to do in order to get the money.

It’s the lazy attitude of lads like yourself that causes all the problems and makes farmers look like idiots. Why were 90% of participants able to follow the rules and keep the money? It can’t have been that hard to achieve when compliance was that high?

There was also a certain amount of participants that knew from the start they wouldn’t be complying and so they used it as an interest free loan. Nothing wrong with that but take them away from the numbers and there was only a very small amount of non compliance.

For someone that’s a solicitor you’re surely dealing with far more complicated issues on a daily basis than the simplicity of just reducing the nitrogen produced on your farm? Is there someone to hold your hand and guide you through all them things as well or do you have to stand on your own 2 feet and deal with them yourself? I’d imagine it’s the latter or you wouldn’t be very successful in business so it’s baffling that you couldn’t figure out BEAM.

Grammar and calculations are two different aspects, I assume you must be better in grammar than you are in maths.

Solicitors and politicians understand words, accountants and engineers understand maths. There are thousands of farmers that have to do nitrates calculations every year. It not just those in derogations. They only have to watch the upper limit of 250 which is a hard level to reach. Most farmers in Derogation need never heed limits as they are stocked at 18o-220N/HA The real lads watching nitrates are drystock farmers stocked heavily or lower stocked dairy farmers not in a derogation as they are drawing GLAS. They must remain below 170 and may have to export slurry to reach that limit. For those in GLAS using LESS they have to do that calculation in the next few weeks if they want to paid GLAS in this finiancial year. Often they not just calculate there own but also the stock nitrates levels of the farm they are exporting into.

If you have to resort to trying to find problems with someone’s grammar due to not being able to argue anything that’s in their post then I think that says a lot more about you than them.

Exporting nitrates made no difference to BEAM so you had absolutely no need to be trying to calculate anything to do with exports.

It was very simple, you produced “x” amount of nitrates in the reference period, produce 5% less this year to get the money.

You didn’t have to look at anything to do with exports, imports, land, hectares, nothing like that. Basically just how much s**t is coming from every animal in your herd. That was it.

Well said that

Listen Archimedes you've made your point several times, take a break from keyboard Warrior for a while instead of jumping down peoples throats. Yes we all know the t&c's now but it wasn't as clear to many folks at the time. It's a bit rich to be claiming a Nazi amnesty on grammar while at the same time harping on about how lads should read the t&c's

If you are referring to me as Archimedes, I am take the compliment. I am not jumping down anybody throat. However it sickens my sh!t to see lads unwilling to help themselves and that is the issue here. It's not rocket science. Lads got a second bite at the cherry. It's up to them to take it. Nitrates adjustment are about corrective action early in the time period as you need to do less to hold onto the payment.