New Acres scheme

A lad near me had an acres inspection last november.He has geese and swans option in his plan .Had a bull out on this plot on inspection so a penalty is been applied by dept as no stock allowed from oct 1st in geese and swans option plots.Doesnt know yet what his penalty will be .No acres payment as of yet.

New to this scheme and famring , where do you stand with diggers on the lands clearing drains ?

I was on to my CP coordinators last week about NPIs and I was told not to expect them to be signed of til at least June.

i need to fence now but told I won’t get paid if it’s done before being signed off. Pure disaster

No shortage of funding- they were all able get new big jeeps.

from speaking to my local TD- he said the computer system wasn’t upgraded to take the extra crowd. And it’s months behind now.

From memory, if existing drains are blocked they can be cleaned with minimal disturbance to vegetation and soil cover. As far as I'm aware no new drains or any new drainage allowed. Best to confirm with advisor.

I would assume that mole ploughing would be considered as drainage and therefore not allowed. But to be 100% sure better to get it confirmed by one of the acres team. I'm not doing any mole ploughing for that reason. Hoping to get existing drains cleaned up later this year.

only got word yesterday formally that I am in acers.

Planner said today that he's doubtful June (which is what they said) will happen.

So no hope of May.

I'm a bit late as usual but this is a great tool for planting slips or small trees, I picked it up at a market a few years back buy I was really grateful to it this spring.

We used to call that a grubber. Maybe known by different names elsewhere.

An adze (/ædz/) or adz is an ancient and versatile cutting tool similar to an axe but with the cutting edge perpendicular to the handle rather than parallel. Adzes have been used since the Stone Age. (from Google).

So what's actually a mattock is what we'd call a grubber. I actually thought what I had in the photo was a mattock when in fact it is actually a grubber.

It's worse than ditches and dykes!

Am in first tranche of ACRES, was chatting a neighbour yday who is also in it and a tractor went by with fertiliser spreader on it.Neighbours ground would be drier than mine and he was saying he had a few tonne of fertiliser put out already,I said it will take at least another few days drying for me to be able to get into the wetter spots.

He asked me if I had soil samples done yet and I said no and that I hadn't heard anything from planner about doing them. Neighbour said he had to get samples taken so as to know how much fertilser he could put out.

So I'm wondering did I miss a DEPT memo or do you definitely need soil samples done if in Acres before spreading any bag stuff this year?…….at least I've nothing spread yet!😅

Thanks for anyones thoughts.

Soil samples were supposed to be done before 15th of May this year but due to the bad weather we now have until the 31st of December to get them done. I posted a link about it a while back.

Ok thanks for filling me in,my planner who would normally be fairly on the ball never mentioned it to me.Every day is helping to soak out ground more so ideally I would like to get bag stuff out the middle of next week.

Ideally you should sample before nitrogen goes out…….I'm with Teagasc and am sure there's probably a backlog in getting samples done quickly.

Those of you with Teagasc……..did they send out a person to take the soil samples?……..or could you take the samples yourself and send them in?

Was talking to a neighbour yesterday evening who is with a private planner for ACRES.. I said to him I seemed to be behind the curve on this Soil Sampling craic.His private planner gave him the equipment to do his own sampling a few months ago and neighbour then got them sent off for analysis via his planner.

Thanks for any replies.