237 farmers in Louth receive €1.1 million in ACRES payments

Following the issuance of interim payments to remaining Tranche 1 applicants of the Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) last week, a total of 237 farmers in Louth have received over €1.1 million in payments.

ACRES is the Government's flagship agri-environmental scheme, with an allocation of €1.5 billion over the period to 2027 aimed at facilitating the participation of 50,000 farmers in significant and targeted environmental action over a five-year period.

The amounts paid in the interim payments are €4,000 to those in the ACRES General approach and €5,000 to participants in the ACRES Co-operation Project approach. Combined with the advance payments made before Christmas, 237 farmers in Louth have now received over €1.1 million in ACRES payments.

According to Louth based Senator, Erin McGreehan, the scheme has "attracted enormous interest from farmers across Louth."

Senator McGreehan said that "my party colleague, the Minister for Agriculture, has worked to ensure that all farmers that wanted to participate were facilitated but the increased numbers combined with the complexity of the scheme unfortunately led to the processing of advance payments taking longer than envisaged. 

"I know and appreciate just how important these payments are to farmers and I am glad that the Minister introduced an interim payment to those that didn’t get their advance last December. These interim payments were made last week. 

Senator McGreehan added: “I know that intensive work is continuing on the calculation of the full payments due to farmers under ACRES. When this work is completed, the ACRES payments, which will issue to farmers in June, will take into account the interim payments already made to the relevant participants.

"A letter is being issued this week to all those ACRES participants who are getting the interim payment to explain how the process will work.”