The annual CAP beneficiaries publication released by the Department of Agriculture always makes interesting reading, and this year is no different. Digging into the data we can extract some industry trends as well as see who some of the biggest winners were.

Changes in schemes between 2023 and 2024, plus changes in how data is presented where local development company grants are broken out to the individual recipients, means that there are significantly fewer payments exceeding €1m in 2024 than had been seen in previous years.

Almost all of the payments above €1m were sectoral support (in the case of the Monaghan mushroom co-op), Advisory (Animal Health Ireland), Technical Assistance (FRS) and knowledge exchange (Teagasc). The payments to the Hen Harrier Project, WCCP Ltd, the Pearl Mussel Project and South Kerry Dev Partnership were all made under Co-operation.

A significant portion of the payments to Teagasc were made under the knowledge exchange heading, with most of this funding being passed on to farmers afterwards. The organisation was the only member of the €1m club engaged in active farming, so was the only one to receive a Basic Income Support for Sustainability (BISS) payment. In total across its sites in Carlow, Galway, Meath, Kilkenny, Cavan, Wexford, Cork, and Tipperary, Teagasc received BISS payments of €308,766.

The total mount of overall expenditure under CAP contained in this report is €2.1bn, an increase of €475m on the previous year’s total, or an increase of almost 30%.

Payment changes

The changes in the CAP mean that Direct Payments, which made up the majority of those reported for 2023 have fallen to almost zero in the recent report. Instead, BISS schemes for climate and environment, and natural area payments make up the lion’s share of the 2024 allocations.

The changes in the CAP allocation have also seen a drop in payments to some recipients. For example, the Goodman-linked Bellingham Farms in Co Louth received €193,576 in direct payments in the 2023 report. In this report, total payments had dropped to €106,584, consisting of €65,151 in BISS, €32,438 in payments under schemes for the climate and environment, €4,828 under environmental, climate and other management commitments and €1,340 under complementary redistributive income support for sustainability.

In the case of payments linked to the Magnier family and their agricultural concerns, the drop in direct payment is more than compensated by the rise in environmental payments.

Total payments received by recipients listed in Table 2 were €651,979 in the report, up from €597,196 the previous year. MacQuarie Unlimited received the second largest payment in the State under the “schemes for the climate and environment” at €96,545.

The single largest recipient of payments under that scheme, which are generally linked to the number of hectares of land farmed, was €105,113 to Godolphin Ireland Limited, the Irish operation of Godolphin racing owned by the Dubai-ruling Al Maktoum family.

Incorporation popularity?

As stated above, the total payments under the CAP rose by almost 30%, due almost entirely to increased environmental payments under the new plan. When looking at the data provided, we can see how many recipients of CAP money were limited companies, and how much those payments rose between years.

In 2023 there were 3,910 recipients who were a limited company (the usual form for a farm incorporation to take), while in 2024 that number had risen to 4,828, an increase of 23%. Total payments to limited companies rose from €156.2m in 2023 to €172.8m in 2024, a rise of only 10.6%.

To explain why both of these numbers are below the rise in the total value of payments at 30%, we have to take several factors into consideration. First of all, the change in how payments are made under Leader funding means that the actual recipient of the funds, rather than the local community development committees previously listed. This change has added 179 new limited companies to the list for 2024. If we discount them from the numbers, the overall increase in limited companies receiving payments is reduced to 18%. The total payments increase drops to 5%.

Basically, a larger number of companies are, on average, getting a smaller portion of the pie. This probably makes sense when we look at how the new CAP payments are structured. The rush to incorporate among farmers has slowed in recent years, with the move generally reserved for larger, more profitable operations. These same operations are the ones who have benefitted least from the changes to the CAP as more profitable farms are generally the ones with the least room for environmental measures which are aimed at reducing output per hectare.

Comment

The publication of the list of CAP recipients on the Department of Agriculture website is a trove of information about the trends that are governing the financial wellbeing of the Irish farming, and increasingly the rural, landscape.

While the increase in payments is welcome, the distribution of them does point to the overarching policy contained within the most recent CAP of making environmental measures a significant target for improvement.

Farmers will act to whatever financial incentives they are given, but there may be a limit to how far things can be stretched through State aid measures.

In hard years, CAP payments can make a significant difference to the profitability of even the most efficiently run operation. If those payments are set up to reward those farmers who target environmental outcomes more than raw output, then they are incentivising the intended behaviour.

However, if the change in payments risks pulling the safety net out from under good farmers who chose to graze to the ditches in order to maximise output, then we may risk disincentivising the kind of farmer who adds the most to economic activity.

Downstream industries such as milk and beef processing, as well as a myriad of secondary businesses, rely on farmers maintaining their output. This CAP beneficiaries report is starting to show how those are the very farmers who benefit least from the new measures.