Single Payment deadline looms (From Gazette & Herald)

Single Payment deadline looms

11:51am Thursday 14th May 2009

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THE clock ticks inexorably down towards midnight this Friday and the deadline for putting in this year’s Single Payment application – unless you want to incur a penalty. Would that the same applied to the RPA in their obligation to pay us on December 1, but such is life at the moment; there is one rule for politicians and their bureaucratic systems and another for the rest of us.

If you have not yet dispatched your SP5 form, then I would advise hand-delivery to Northallerton rather than committing the application to the post, and you can do so without an appointment. Over the last few weeks , two or three things on the form have caused ripples:

* If your occupation of land has changed by selling, buying or renting, then you need to check that the transfer of entitlements has gone through before you submit your claim.

* Check that you have ticked or crossed all the boxes that have not been pre-populated.

* OSR contracts have to be declared and this year especially there is a lot of spring sown OSR.

In case you thought you could put your SP files away for a year, the Rural Land Registry has announced its intention to update its mapping system from next month. We are going to a briefing meeting shortly and I will report back.

Have your say on disease protection

Having created such a shambles of our economy, the Government will be keen on any cost-saving measures, and one such target is the unbelievably expensive animal disease controls that have swept across the country in recent years.

It has to be said that the root of the problem often lies in the inadequate protection given to our agricultural industry at the point of entry into this country.

You only have to compare the screening of people and their luggage travelling to Australia and New Zealand to our own pathetic posters and the odd sniffer dog to realise our shores are virtually unprotected.

And you can add to this the farcical stand that is being made by Hilary Benn and his wet-necks over culling badgers.

All in all, it has added up to an expensive drain on resources ranging from the catastrophic Foot and Mouth outbreak to today’s growing problem of spreading TB.

The Government, through DEFRA, is now seeking to make farmers partly responsible for the cost of disease control, but at the same time maintaining the right to decide in what manner control shall take place.

In other words, DEFRA is going to make the final decision as to what should be done, but we will be expected to pick up half the bill.

It is organising a series of roadshows around the country at which you can express your views.

The Yorkshire Workshop, as they call it, will be taking place at York Auction Centre on Thursday, May 28.

I would urge as many of you as possible to come and make your views known.

Regulations could hit sheep industry

IT does seem to me that our Minister, Mr Benn, is fiddling whilst our sheep industry is about to be burned out of existence.

We have only got seven months to go until compulsory sheep EID comes in and I think when it happens there will be a lot of farmers who decide not only to go out of breeding sheep but also to abandon feeding them.

Winter feeding of hoggs has traditionally been a staple enterprise for Ryedale, but the new EID rules could persuade many to give up.

Present proposals include the need to manually record all the incoming flock ear tag numbers and then to repeat the process when you sell them.

The worst feature is that if you dispatch 100 sheep to market they may contain multiple flock numbers, all of which have to be set down. Not only that, when the sheep arrive at market and are sorted into lots, the whole process is repeated.

To cap it all, once the sheep get to the abattoir, the identification is lost anyway because sheep heads are thrown away after slaughter.

Our Livestock Auctioneers Association has brought out a form for farmers who feed lambs to complete if they think they might give up as a consequence of the EID regulations.

We shall be approaching individual farmers over the next fortnight, but if you can help, please let us know.

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