At long last DEFRA has shed more light on the Greening element of the Basic Payment Scheme. Due to start on January 1 2015, farmers and landowners have been waiting to hear further details on greening before making key decisions on next year’s cropping plans.

“This clarification of Environmental Focus Area (EFA) options and their respective weightings, will allow farmers to work out how much land needs to be allocated to EFA’s” says Gareth Rowe of Smiths Gore’s Truro Office.

“Careful selection of EFA options may mean that farmers actually have to allocate less than 5 per cent of their arable area to EFA’s due to the different weightings that each option carries.”

There will be five different EFA options - land lying fallow, buffer strips, catch and cover crops, legumes and hedges. More could be added in the future. Each of these options will have different weighting factors with catch crops/cover crops having the lowest weighting and hedges the highest.

aDEFRA has also clarified how agri-environment schemes and greening measures will interact. Many farmers feared they would fall foul of EU ‘double funding’ rules which effectively prohibit being paid twice for the same environmental feature. This could easily have happened with buffer strips which are commonplace in both ELS and HLS agreements but are also an EFA option.

Thankfully, DEFRA has stood by its initial commitment made in Autumn 2012 that farmers in an agri-environment scheme should not be disadvantaged because of the new greening measures.

“‘No HLS agreements and all ELS agreements which started before January 1 2012 (including OELS), will have their payments adjusted for greening” explains Smiths Gore’s Alison May.

“For the 4,000 or so ELS agreements which started after January 1 2012, agreement holders have the option to either amend their agreement, accept reduced payments or exit the scheme without penalty.”

Natural England will be writing to all agreement holders who may be affected from mid-summer onwards.

In an update on cross-compliance, DEFRA has also announced that the closed season for hedge trimming will be extended from the 31st July to the 31st August.

Lastly, farmers will be relieved to hear that the Soil Protection Reviews will no longer be needed from 2015.

Further details and a Q & A on double funding and ES agreements can be found on the DEFRA website. Alternatively, you can contact Gareth Rowe at Smiths Gore’s Truro Office on 01872 274646 or e-mail gareth.rowe@smithsgore.co.uk