Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): I welcome Peter McEvoy, chair of the Northern Ireland Environment Link (NIEL) sustainable agriculture policy working group; Mark McCormick, vice chair of the NIEL sustainable agriculture policy working group; Mike McClure, NIEL area lead on landscapes; and Peter Gallagher, NIEL high nature value farm adviser. Thank you for coming to the meeting and presenting. We have your paper, but we ask that you give us a quick summation before we open the floor to questions. Thank you.

Mr Peter McEvoy (Northern Ireland Environment Link): Thank you, Chair and Committee. I extend my congratulations to you, Chair, on your appointment. You have already introduced us, but I will highlight our diverse range of views. Peter Gallagher wears many hats, but he is a farmer in an area with natural constraints (ANC), and he represents the West Fermanagh Farmers Cluster. My other two colleagues represent environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) and work on landscapes. We all look at the issue from different perspectives but have come to similar conclusions.

I will set out a few of our headline positions before I pass to my colleagues to talk more specifically. I enjoyed listening to our Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) colleagues in the previous session, and we concur with many of their points. They talked a lot about agrienvironment issues. We recognise that a lot of farmers are nervous about agrienvironment schemes, but I will highlight a successful mechanism. The environmental farming scheme (EFS) group programme, which DAERA sponsors, provides facilitation support for farmers to avoid some of the pitfalls and reduce the fear of schemes. We wish to see that being continued.

Overall, our headline position as a collective is that we see a strong case for supporting farmers in ANC. There are some big and very persuasive numbers in our written submission around the economic challenges and the high importance of ANC for nature. I am delighted that some of those figures have already been of use this morning. Like our NFFN colleagues, we reiterate that this must not be unconditional income support; if the Bill is to be successful, there have to be conditional environmental outcomes. Finally, as has been discussed, farm viability and economic delivery are not mutually exclusive; they work very well together in that landscape. The reward should be for farming and environment together.

I will now hand over to colleagues to talk specifically about farming, landscapes and nature, after which I will close.

Mr Peter Gallagher (Northern Ireland Environment Link): Thank you, Peter. First and foremost, I am a farmer. I farm ANC in Fermanagh, and I work with dozens of like-minded farmers in the same position through the West Fermanagh Farmers Cluster and my role as a high nature value farm adviser.

I will start with one headline number: the average net income of less favoured area (LFA) cattle and sheep farms is around £11,700. If you take away direct payments, that becomes a loss of almost £18,000, which is quite a staggering figure. Although those are serious businesses, they are, unfortunately, doing a job that the market does not pay for. Up to 1,000 cattle a week go through Enniskillen mart alone. Most of them head to lowland farms for further finishing.

The ANC farms are largely the foundation of the Northern Ireland beef trade. Support has been our lifeline, but successive schemes have redistributed our income towards lowland farms and left us at a growing disadvantage. We have lost the ANC payment; up to 17% of our area-based payment has been taken away and moved into headage schemes; the suckler cow scheme pays per head for calving targets; the beef carbon reduction scheme pays per head; the protein crop scheme pays for crops that our land cannot grow; there is no sheep scheme at all; and, as Mark will set out shortly, many of us cannot access meaningful agrienvironment funding.

Money has been moved from the hectare to the head. On land that carries fewer head, that means less money for our farmers. The gap has not just stayed open; successive policies have widened it even more. You can see it in Fermanagh: almost the whole county is ANC, and it receives the lowest beef carbon reduction scheme payments in Northern Ireland. It is not about taking from lowland farmers, who depend on the cattle that we produce; it is about equitable policy that works for everyone. ANC farms produce more than just cattle: small family farms like ours have raised generations of vets, agricultural consultants and advisers, on whom the whole industry now relies. If you were to lose those farms, you would also lose that pipeline. The point is simple: if you were to lose the farmer, you would lose the community and the landscape. ANC support at around 3% of the current budget is a very small ask for what it protects.

I hand over to Mike.

Mr Mike McClure (Northern Ireland Environment Link): Thanks, Peter. I work with Landscapes NI, which is the network of all of our designated and iconic landscapes, including the eight areas of outstanding natural beauty, our two UNESCO global geoparks and the UNESCO world heritage site. I think about things on a landscape level and work with rural communities. I live in a rural community in the Mournes and have been part of that community for 30 years.

ANC farms help to sustain the character, heritage and identity of many of our most valued landscapes in Northern Ireland. They support local communities, tourism, recreation and a vital rural economy. Although those landscapes were created by geological processes, they have been shaped for thousands of years by the people who live and work in those places, and primarily farming. Their appearance, cultural heritage and high nature value have been shaped by generations. Without viable farm businesses, that stewardship of incredible places that we depend on for much of our tourism is placed at risk. The landscape-management benefits that those farms provide are often invisible.

We have already heard that 68% of our AONB land lies within severely disadvantaged areas (SDAs). That demonstrates the extent to which those valued landscapes depend on the viability of the myriad family farms that exist on them. Our most iconic designated landscapes contribute to multiple public goods, which you heard about earlier, including carbon storage, water management, health and well-being, outdoor recreation, social cohesion, education, flood mitigation, climate resilience and, of course, as you are going to hear more about, nature recovery. Supporting the viability of those farm businesses helps maintain the capacity of the landscapes to deliver on those public goods.

We believe that ANC policy and the Bill must be about more than just supporting farmers. This is about supporting our rural economy and vibrant and flourishing communities within those landscapes, which are critical to ensuring that they continue to deliver for the broader Northern Ireland economy and for the well-being of our society. When you discuss the Bill, I urge you to think not just about individual farms and farm payments, but about rural community engagement and cohesion, and ensuring that we have vibrant, flourishing communities within our landscapes.

I will hand over to Mark to talk more about the nature benefits that those areas bring.

Mr Mark McCormick (Northern Ireland Environment Link): Thank you, Mike. I work for RSPB NI. Many areas of natural constraint overlap with high-nature-value farmland, which includes our priority habitats, peatlands and protected designated sites. The evidence that we have submitted to the Committee demonstrates that those landscapes contain a disproportionate share of Northern Ireland's most important environmental assets. For example, our analysis shows that severely disadvantaged areas — SDAs — contain around 86% of mapped priority peatland, 84% of mapped priority grassland and 86% of the terrestrial biodiversity areas of special scientific interest (ASSIs). The SDAs also contain almost all of our hen harrier special protection area (SPA) network. Therefore, these are not just constrained farming areas but some of Northern Ireland's most environmentally valuable landscapes.

We believe that the debate should not simply be about compensating farmers for production constraints, because the same characteristics that make farming in ANCs more challenging are often the very reason that those areas deliver biodiversity, carbon resilience, water regulation and the other landscape benefits and ecosystem services. Our view is that future support should increasingly move towards the "public money for public goods" approach that has been outlined, which rewards farmers for the outcomes that those landscapes are naturally suited to providing.

One option that, we believe, deserves consideration is to link any sort of future ANC payments to participation or to agrienvironment schemes, with the ANC payment acting as a targeted top-up payment to support farm viability. Our analysis shows that agrienvironment payments alone may be insufficient to maintain the long-term viability of many ANC farms. Peter has already highlighted the economic vulnerability of those farming systems. Furthermore, from working with farmers in areas such as the Antrim hills and Fermanagh, I know that managing those landscapes often involves additional costs, whether those costs be due to increased fencing requirements or the more challenging terrain, requiring specialist machinery. Lower stock density is also a factor. For that reason, we believe that there remains a rationale for an ANC payment to operate as a type of targeted top-up to agrienvironment support, helping to ensure that farm businesses that are delivering environmental value and public goods remain viable and resilient within the severely disadvantaged areas.

There is already a strong foundation for that approach. More than 85% of the environmental farming scheme's higher-level agreement land was located within SDA. That high figure tells us two key things: first, that, as we have already established, most of our most environmentally valuable landscapes are contained within ANC; and, secondly, that, where environmental funding or agrienvironment funding is available, investment naturally gravitates towards those areas as a result. Linking ANC support to agrienvironment would, therefore, strengthen an existing relationship that is already evident rather than introduce an entirely new concept. It could also help support farm viability, whilst encouraging greater uptake of agrienvironment schemes in the landscapes where you need to have high agrienvironment participation to get the best environmental outcomes.

Additional environmental conditionality could be delivered through the agrienvironment agreement, thus avoiding the need to create other layers of environmental conditionality and more complex compliance frameworks. That could help minimise the administrative burdens that arise with adding those types of schemes — we hear from the Department about the like of the IT infrastructure that such things require to be designed. It could help with that, whilst ensuring that public funding remains linked to the delivery of environmental outcomes.

However, there is an important caveat, which has already been touched on this morning and that the Committee should consider, not just in respect of the ANC Bill but more widely with regard to public funding within SDA. The vision or approach that I am talking about will only work if there is a robust agrienvironment framework in place. At present, that is just not the case. Significant gaps remain, including uncertainty around the replacement for the environmental farming scheme's higher level. That is putting farmers in SDA at a severe disadvantage. There is also limited support for the management of existing habitats through the Farming with Nature transition scheme for land outside of designated sites and priority habitats. I acknowledge and reiterate what Peter McEvoy said — Declan has raised it, too — about farmer confidence in schemes. The advisory provision is an important element in giving farmers the confidence to go into these types of schemes. We can get into that.

This all results in a policy contradiction. Many of the farms that are already delivering, or are capable of delivering, the greatest public goods and environmental benefits are among those least able to access meaningful agrienvironment funding. The farmers who are managing our most valuable habitats and landscapes should be among the first, not the last, to benefit from this type of investment. Our overall message is fairly simple: support for ANC farmers is justified, but it should be designed in a way that strengthens farm viability and environmental delivery together, because the future of many of our most valuable landscapes depends on the resourcing of both.

I hand you back to Peter McEvoy. Thank you.

Mr McEvoy: I am conscious of time and that we have thrown a lot of information at you, but I will sum up with a couple of points that I have heard from colleagues. Farms in the less-favoured areas — areas of natural constraint — are financially fragile. They need support to survive. They are really important for nature: all of the high nature value farmland and protected sites lie in these areas. Those areas are important and their viability matters, not just for the environment and farming but socially, for our landscapes and for our rural communities. We have heard that agrienvironment is, potentially, a good delivery mechanism. Public payments can sustain farms and habitats, but they are not working. We recognise two routes for support, as Mark has just said. The ANC Bill has a role to play in putting new environmental conditions on more support, but we also need to expand and reform our agrienvironment so that it pays properly and long term. That sums up our position. Thank you for your patience.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Thank you very much. That was really helpful. The holistic view of the agrienvironment that you have given has allowed us to see the consequences and recognise what farmers are already doing in that environment.

I have one question, which is similar to what I asked in the previous session. Your briefing proposes that future ANC support should reward the environmental benefits that are delivered by farmers. How will DAERA be able to measure that? What environmental outcomes should be linked to ANC payments? How will they measure those benefits without becoming overly bureaucratic? We have talked about the onerous nature of complex regulations and bureaucracy.

Mr Gallagher: We are effectively talking about two different mechanisms: that is how I see it. ANC support is a safety net in its own right. Its purpose is to keep farmers on the land. The more farmers that we can keep, the more land managers that we have to carry out agrienvironment schemes. At the moment, the position is precarious. There is a lot of consolidation of farms going on, and a lot of farmers are at an age at which they should be retired. Farms are not operating at a level that is optimal for food production or the environment.

There is undergrazing, for example, which is as bad as overgrazing. The ANC payment would therefore create a safety net that would keep the next generation interested in the farm. Agrienvironment schemes could then come along and support farms and land managers to create the really good outcomes so that they could then focus on priority species and priority habitats.

Mr McEvoy: Our colleagues talked earlier about results-based schemes and scorecards, and we advocate that approach as well, because the farmer is being engaged. Currently, farmers are paid to follow a prescription, and our role is to make sure that they follow it so that they can get their payment, but, if we tell farmers that the goal is, for example, to have more butterflies or more of a particular flower, they can respond to that signal, do it in their own way and measure their success themselves, and we can help them understand that. It therefore empowers farmers to deliver.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Peter, to go back to what you were saying about succession farming, in your experience of the farms where you live, is there a danger that they are no longer viable when a generation passes, because nobody is there to take them over? Is that situation prevalent? Given that 92% of ANC farms —.

Mr Gallagher: Yes, that is very evident with ANC farms. A lot of conacre agreements are coming in, and farmers are being consolidated into larger farms, which are not always bad, but that generally involves a drastic change to the management approach. We see the like of hedges being cut back much harder by more industrial-type machinery than the previous generation would have used. If those farms were to carry on with that family understanding and a bit of sympathy around that, there would be fewer of those types of unintended consequences. As farms get larger, there is more pressure on the labour units that carry out the work, so a lot of the management moves to contractors, who are obviously less sympathetic to some of the things that should be valued by society.

Mr McCormick: One of the key things that we are trying to say is that it is really important that such farms remain viable, and the ANC payment could help support that happening. The issue is that we need those farms in order to deliver the environmental outcomes, as our evidence has established. Our priority habitats and protected sites are predominantly within SDAs. We need the farms to remain viable, because land abandonment or the consolidation of farming that Peter just mentioned can lead to intensification. If the land is undermanaged, that can be an issue as well, because a lot of the sites, such as semi-natural grasslands, need management. If those areas go to scrub, that will have an impact on the site's condition. It is therefore essential that farms remain viable in order to have the desired environmental outcomes, because the farmer needs to be on the land to get into the agrienvironment scheme and do that work. What we are trying to say is that the two things — farm viability and environmental outcomes — are linked.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Thank you very much. I will bring in Declan, the Bill sponsor.

Mr McAleer: Thank you very much for what was an interesting presentation, as was the previous one.

A poignant comment was made, which was that the farmers are invisible in land management. That was a telling comment, and it is something that I have always felt. They are not just invisible in land management but completely invisible. The fact that those farms run at a deficit means that the majority of farmers do not have the luxury of being able to work full-time on the farm. A lot of them are on the farm at 5.00 am or 6.00 am, head off to work on building sites and other places of work in Belfast and elsewhere and are then back on the farm from 7.00 pm until 11.00 pm. They do not have the time to get involved in much, because they are completely focused on doing what they do. As a consequence, they have become invisible. It is therefore important that we speak up for them in here and look at any ways in which we can support them, because, as you say, they are the backbone of the red meat industry in the North.

ANCs have fallen through the cracks. The data speaks for itself. There is lower uptake of schemes, such as the beef carbon reduction scheme, in ANCs. There is lower per hectare entitlement. There are issues with the uptake of existing schemes. When the new land eligibility rules came in, most of the extra eligible hectares were in ANCs, but the regional reserve was closed, so the farmers could not even get new entitlements for them. ANCs are always at the back of the queue when it comes to farm support.

There is a socio-economic dimension to it as well. Apart from the economic conditions in rural areas — this is linked to consolidation — if the number of farms is decreased, that, in turn, decreases the number of people living in rural areas. From being on council over the years, we know that one of the main ways in which to get planning permission in rural areas is to have an active farm business. If farms therefore consolidate, we will have fewer farm businesses and fewer people able to live in those areas. We will then see a complete rural decline.

I have almost answered the question that I was going to ask. Do you feel that there is a big gap in agricultural policy that has resulted in a lot of farmers falling through the cracks across a range of social, economic and environmental factors?

Mr McClure: Absolutely. I will give you a concrete example. The Sperrins were designated as an AONB in 1968, but, after 60 years, the management plan, with funding and support, has only just been agreed. To create that management plan, the Sperrins Partnership has been working really hard to engage with communities and the people who live and work in the Sperrins to ensure that there is real buy-in from the whole community. The sector that it has most struggled to connect with is the farming community. It is about exactly what you said: the farmers just do not have time to engage in the process. They are away working in Omagh, Enniskillen or wherever, and they then go back to their farm at night. It has therefore been really challenging for the partnership members to engage with them to ensure that their voice is heard in the management plan. Theirs is a critical voice, because they manage the land where the Sperrins are. That is a strong point to make.

The evidence is that rural depopulation is already happening. Urbanisation is increasing across Europe, and there are predictions that, by 2050, 80% of our populations will live in urban settings. There will then be a disconnect from our land and from our rural communities. It is therefore really important to ensure that we have vibrant rural communities, with people living on the land in those communities, and not just large-scale farms, which, as Peter highlighted, could happen through consolidation.

Mr McEvoy: We have all been involved in various co-design meetings as part of the sustainable agriculture programme (SAP) process. Many of the meetings happen in Hillsborough, at Large Park. Driving in, it always strikes me that the landscape there is the one landscape that the policy vision is designed to fit. It is hard to fit that vision to ANCs, where things are more challenging, because the land is not flat and laid in square fields with four hedges. There is therefore a challenge involved in applying policies to such areas.

Mr McCormick: You mentioned farmer invisibility. One thing that came up in previous evidence sessions was the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) evaluation of the Northern Ireland rural development programme (RDP). On page 138 of the report, a key passage refers to:

and:

The report goes on to talk about the environmental consequences of the absence of grazing and active management, which leads to scrub encroachment, bracken expansion and the loss of sensitive plant species and a declining habitat quality. The NISRA evaluation comes to a conclusion that contradicts that, however, in that it states that there was reason to withdraw the ANC scheme, because there was no proof of additionality or evidence of land abandonment. I would poke at and query that a bit. The phrase "land abandonment" gives the impression of land being completely abandoned, whereas what we know is happening is farm consolidation. The evaluation looks at that through a prism of just land rather than people. For the Committee, it would be more interesting to look at whether there has been a reduction in the number of farm businesses and small farms, because I think that there would be evidence of that.

It is also important to look at the condition of the site features of protected sites in SDAs. Only about 50% are in favourable condition. The Committee can look at the statistics, but part of the reason for that is overgrazing. Some of it is because of undergrazing, however. When looking at the environmental farming scheme higher level, the impression given is that it is always about trying to reduce stocking densities, grazing regimes and such things in order to rotate stock around the farm or to take it off sensitive habitats at certain times of the year. In my experience, however, farmers are trying to have there be more grazing on a habitat, because that is the issue that needs to be managed more in order to prevent scrub encroachment and so on.

I have digressed, but the point that I am trying to make is that, when land abandonment is looked at through that prism, it is land rather than farmers that is looked at. Consolidation of farmland is potentially an issue as well. I would therefore question the NISRA evaluation's conclusion a little bit. We are saying that it would be wise to look at linking farm viability to environmental outcomes and linking ANCs to agrienvironment participation and that type of thing.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Mike, do you want to come in?

Mr McClure: I will follow up on something that Peter said. The processes are often driven by economics, but it is false economics, because they look at only one element of economics, which is the economics of agriculture, not the broader economics of Northern Ireland. We have 15 million tourism visitor bed nights in Northern Ireland. Tourism NI says that the primary reason for people visiting here is our landscapes, and it has data for that. Its target is to create £2 billion in income to this place through tourism. Our landscapes deliver that economic benefit, but agriculture policy is not factored into the broader economic arguments, and it needs to be. A more holistic approach needs to be taken to what is being delivered.

Mr Blair: Thanks to all four of you. You said earlier, Mark, that 86% of at-risk peatland and 84% of similar at-risk grassland are on farms in ANCs. You could easily say to me, "John, if you want the statistics, you can get them from DAERA", but I am keen to hear your feelings on the issue, which you have touched on already. How many farms in those two at-risk categories have already signed up to environmental schemes?

Mr McCormick: The figure in our submission to the Committee is that just over 85% of all EFS higher-level agreements are in SDAs. There is a map on page 15 of our briefing paper. That covers approximately 9·5% of SDAs, so it is just shy of 10%. If, however, the areas outside the priority habitats and designated sites in SDAs — land for which there are EFS wider-level agreements or land that is in the Farming with Nature transition scheme — are included, it is just over 10%. That sounds low, but when we look at the average right across Northern Ireland for farmland and the percentage of agricultural land contained in an agrienvironment scheme, we see that the 'State of Nature' report from 2023 stated that it was just under 5%. More than double the number of farms in an agrienvironment scheme in SDAs are therefore performing better than the Northern Ireland average. I will add that 'State of Nature' highlighted that 5% figure. It did a comparative analysis of the rest of the UK — Scotland, England and Wales — where the averages were well over 20%, so it is clear that Northern Ireland is lagging way behind on agrienvironment participation.

That is not necessarily because of farmers' lack of interest. A big part of the problem is that schemes have constantly stopped and started again. The countryside management scheme was withdrawn before the environmental farming scheme was ready. That led to an 80% reduction in the coverage of land, and we have never been able to get that back. In 2023, history repeated itself when the EFS was withdrawn before the new Farming with Nature package was ready. We are still waiting for that package to be rolled out. That has particularly disadvantaged farms in SDAs, because they have priority habitats and protected areas. The majority of those farmers currently do not have access to the higher-level agrienvironment scheme. For farms that were already in the scheme, under tranche 4 and tranche 5, we managed to secure one-year rollover agreements so that they could maintain management, but there are a lot of farmers for whom, if they were to want to get on to an agrienvironment scheme tomorrow, there would be nothing for them.

Mr Blair: That 5% figure for agrienvironment participation overall is startling and very different from much of the narrative that we hear a lot of the time. You mentioned a figure of 15% for ANCs, which is clearly much better than 5%. That is not the number of farmers. We are talking about the land, are we not?

Mr McCormick: Yes.

Mr Blair: OK. The number of farmers may be quite different. It could even be a higher percentage.

Mr McCormick: We have the figures, but I cannot recall them off the top of my head.

Mr Blair: That is fine. I could get them from DAERA, as I confessed at the start, but I really wanted to get your grasp of it. Your submission has outlined them well, so thank you.

Mr McCormick: We have the figures and can provide them.

Mr Blair: That is super. Thank you.

Mr Wilson: It is good to have you here today. In your presentation, you said that it is not a call for unconditional income support. During the previous session, Louise Skelly gave a very detailed picture of her situation and how she manages her land. She has a particular interest in the grass issue. Given where she is located and the dryness of the summer, she has managed that particularly well. It was impressive to hear. Based on that and on the fact that we have a proposal for a payment that, if approved, would ultimately increase year-on-year and provide what would be significant incentives, how are you looking to evaluate that payment, considering that it is more generous than other payments? If I recall correctly from previous presentations from the Assembly's Research and Information Service (RaISe), no other payment will rise annually.

Mr McEvoy: That is slightly outside our area of expertise. We work on agrienvironment payments and rates and look for those to be more than income forgone and to recognise ecosystem services. Until we define what a conditional payment would be in an ANC, it is a hard question to answer. Agrienvironment payments as they stand really only recognise income forgone, so a farmer is not making any money. He is being compensated only for the loss of production that he may have had on that habitat. That is an issue for agrienvironment participation. I did not answer your question, but that is the kind of angle on which we work strongly. Peter, as a farmer, you may have more to say about that.

Mr Gallagher: I can speak from a farmer's perspective. As I pointed out, I farm in an ANC and have gone through a process in which we have already lost area-based payments. We lost 9% and then 17%. There was not a mechanism to get our fair share of any of that back, so we are already operating at a deficit. Going back through history, that has been happening from the 1970s onwards. We had area-based payments based on historical payments, so we came in at a disadvantage. We had a transition period of 10 years, which fell short at six years. That went some way to trying to address the disadvantage at which we were put. We have now moved back to headage payments, and that is further widening the gap and putting us at a bigger disadvantage.

It may differ slightly from the guys' position, but my position is that the baseline here needs to be reasonably low. It needs to provide a safety net in order to keep farmers on the land. We are here seeking the same shared outcome, in that we think that ANC payments are positive and could be positive for ANCs. We are looking at it through a slightly different lens, but the desired outcome is the same. These guys need land managers. All the environment-type work needs people. We need to keep people in those areas, and the best way in which to do that is to make sure that their future is viable, and the best way in which to do that is to create a minimum entry so that we ensure that farmers are there and providing livestock on the land, because these guys have told me, "We need the ground grazed". Anything else will be negative for everything.

I also feel that there is potential in SDAs to increase production in a very sensitive way. As I said earlier, lots of farmers are getting to a stage of their life at which they have naturally reduced numbers, because the next generation is not coming through with the same enthusiasm that they had.

Times have changed, as have economic conditions. There are easier options in life for the next generation. There is still a passion to be on the farm, but the economics just do not make sense for them to do so. If we can therefore create a mechanism that matches inflation, or however it is proposed, so that ANC payments keep people on the farm, and the agrienvironment payment then comes along to top that up to create the outcome that we as a society claim that we want for biodiversity, water quality and air quality, we can change the future for ANCs and produce high-quality sustainable food on the back of it.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Thank you very much.

Ms Murphy: Peter, I will focus on County Fermanagh, as the Chair will perhaps understand. A total of 92% of land in County Fermanagh is designated as an ANC. Between the first and second year of the beef carbon reduction scheme, County Fermanagh received £1·83 million. By way of comparison, County Tyrone received £11·94 million. Does the combination of such schemes for mostly ANC land, as in County Fermanagh, therefore identify a policy gap that justifies the Bill?

Mr Gallagher: It certainly does. As I said, we have lost 17% of our area-based payment, which is a huge hit. As I pointed out, there is no scheme for sheep support, so those guys have absolutely no mechanism for getting back that money. As for the protein crop scheme, we cannot grow those crops. We are also the lowest recipient of funding from the beef carbon reduction scheme. The suckler cow scheme will provide some opportunities, but there are huge difficulties there because of the terrain that we farm. It is harder to get those cows to meet the dates. In particular, calving heifers at two years old is a major struggle in a hill-type environment. That has narrowed the potential for us to get back that money or even to meet the scheme requirements with the animals that we do have. We have lost our flat-rate payment per hectare and are carrying a much lower level of stock, so opportunities are further exacerbated or removed for us. We are definitely struggling, and that has been a pattern throughout the history of all subsidy schemes. There is, however, an opportunity to redress the balance through the Bill.

Mr McEvoy: Looking through an environmental lens, I will say that those schemes were developed in good faith to improve productivity and reduce carbon emissions per unit of output, but that requires people to push harder in efficiency terms, and that is not the kind of land on which anyone wants to do that. There should be extensive low-stocking densities and longer rearing periods. Those are what are delivered efficiently. It is the sweet spot that our Nature Friendly Farming Network colleagues talked about. Moreover, the situation is nuanced. We may see the same number of animals in County Fermanagh, and we may be saying that one area is overstocked while another is understocked. There is the double threat of intensification and abandonment happening at once, so we need to be careful, because looking at averages does not tell the whole story about the scale of the landscape. Things are becoming polarised.

Ms Murphy: A broader issue in your written submission is the importance of farm viability in those areas. Without the additional supports proposed in Bills such as this, that will have an existential impact on rural communities more broadly. Without viable farms, the communities that surround those farms will cease to exist.

Mr McCormick: The evidence from the farm business income data demonstrates the economic vulnerability of farming systems in SDAs. As Peter said, that is exacerbated by the fact that many farms have fewer opportunities to recover income through schemes such as the beef carbon reduction scheme. One thing that is key from the environmental side, which was said in response to John earlier, is that just shy of 10% of SDAs are within EFS higher-level agreements. If the other 90% were to want to get into agrienvironment tomorrow and increase their income through environmental outcomes, there would be nothing for them as it stands. That is a core issue as well, and it is something else that needs to be addressed. Addressing that issue would support farms in SDAs as well as in ANCs. Farm viability and environmental outcomes need to be brought together.

The Chairperson (Ms D Armstrong): Thank you very much. It was helpful for the Committee to hear the evidence. Thank you for coming in today. We have exhausted all our questions.