Farmer Focus: What would we do without BPS payments?

It is important to give credit when credit is due. I was about to criticise our department for not paying out my Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payment, when the post arrived with a letter informing me that the funds had been lodged to my bank account.

Happy days! So now, instead of criticising, I must congratulate our minister and her department staff for honouring her promise to pay out  95% of claims by the end of December.

This was not an easy task in this year of transition, with a new entitlement and greening system to apply to both owned and rented land.

See also: Read more from our arable Farmer Focus writers

Add to that the active farming rules and we had the potential for significant delays.

Talk among farmers over the past few weeks has been about when the BPS money was likely to arrive, followed by a huge sigh of relief once it did.

This highlights the huge dependence agriculture in Northern Ireland has on this payment from Brussels.

Over the past few years the payment has made up about 85% of total income from farming here and I suspect that the figure for 2015 will be even worse.

Few bills are paid and most suppliers don’t even bother to ask until the BPS is paid out.

This is not a healthy situation and I’m sure most farmers would prefer to earn the majority of their income from a realistic product price rather than a handout from Brussels.

This situation leads me to wonder how our industry would survive in the event of a UK exit from the EU.

What, if anything, would replace the BPS payments? This, I think, will be the big topic of debate for 2016.

The campaign to leave seems to be gathering momentum and we can be sure that agriculture will not feature prominently in the minds of voters, who will be more concerned about the £9.8bn the UK pays to the EU each year, as well as concerns about immigration and security.

We need to know, sooner than later, policy plans for agriculture in the event of an exit. In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy and hopefully prosperous 2016.

Robert Moore farms on the Molenan Estate in Northern Ireland, where his family have farmed for more than 200 years. He switched to arable production in the late 1990s, away from beef and sheep. He still has a small suckler herd on non-suitable arable land.