Farmers in Scotland continue to receive the highest direct payments per farm business, with farm support payouts that are more than double that received in NI, analysis by the Irish Farmers Journal shows.

The latest list of farm support recipients across the UK, recently published by DEFRA, shows that in the 2023-2024 payment window, 15,231 farmers in Scotland received direct support averaging £25,480 per business.

That compares to the situation in NI where 23,911 farmers received an average Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payout of £12,677. For most NI farmers, that BPS money was received in September 2023.

The disparity in payment rates is nothing new and due to the much larger farm size in Scotland. It is thought that the average claimant in Scotland has around 245ha, compared to approximately 40ha in NI.

There are also a number of differences between the two payment regimes. In Scotland, farmers in less favoured areas still receive Area of Natural Constraint (ANC) payments. For the 2023-2024 financial year, 10,610 farmers in Scotland shared an ANC payout of £60.82m, which is an average of £5,733 per farm. The last ANC payments in NI were made in 2018.

Unlike NI where BPS money is capped at £190,000, there is also no upper limit in Scotland. The highest BPS payout in 2023-2024 was £1.31m, with 140 Scottish farms over the NI limit of £190,000 and 628 receiving at least £100,000. In NI, just 114 farms breached that £100,000 total.

Wales

In Wales, farm support payments continue to track quite closely to those in NI. The top Welsh BPS claimant received £286,033, with 12 farms getting over £190,000 and 64 with BPS over £100,000. The average BPS across 16,350 claimants in Wales was £14,306.

England

Traditionally, the average direct payment in England sat at around £26,000 per farm. However, in 2021 the UK government started a seven-year process to gradually shift money from BPS to new agri-environment schemes.

That process has already had a dramatic impact on direct farm support in England. When the 2022-2023 figures were published last year, the average BPS per farm had dropped to £14,623.

The latest data has this average across 82,314 farm businesses at £6,668. With a slow roll-out of new agri-environment schemes, the overall support paid out to farmers is well down in most cases.

That includes the top earners at Dyson Farming Ltd and the National Trust. In 2021-2022, both were in receipt of over £3m in BPS. This dropped to around £1.6m in the data published last year and to around £700,000 in the latest DEFRA list.

Just 25 English farm businesses have direct payments of over £190,000, compared to 963 in the dataset published two years ago.