More than 1,500 Tipperary farmers have received ACRES payments
Tipperary TD says the Agri Climate Rural Environment Scheme has attracted huge interest from farmers
A total of 1,517 farmers in Tipperary have received €6,973,874 in Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES) payments following the issuance of interim payments to remaining Tranche 1 applicants.
Tipperary Fianna Fáil TD, Jackie Cahill said ACRES is a €1.5bn scheme that has attracted enormous interest from farmers across Tipperary.
"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," he continued.
“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, almost 3,000 farmers in total from Tipperary have now received almost €7 million in payments."
Deputy Cahill concluded: “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.”