952 farmers in County Wexford receive €4.56 million in ACRES payments

It's been revealed that 952 farmers in County Wexford receive €4.56 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 952 County Wexford farmers have received €4.56 million in payments. Wexford TD and Minister of State for Law Reform James Browne TD said: “ACRES, which is a €1.5bn scheme, has attracted great interest from farmers across County Wexford. My party colleague, the Minister for Agriculture, has worked to ensure that all farmers that wanted to participate were facilitated. The increased numbers combined with the complexity of the scheme resulted in longer than anticipated processing times for advance payments. "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. “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. 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.” Meanwhile - Local Fianna Fáil Senator Malcolm Byrne, said: “ACRES, which is a €1.5bn scheme, has attracted enormous interest from farmers across Wexford. 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. “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 1,000 farmers in total from Wexford have now received over €4.5 million in payments." Senator Byrne 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.”