I completed my Basic Income Supplement for Sustainability (BISS) application on Thursday evening, hours before the deadline.

I always like to go over all the details one last time before pressing the send button. As a mostly tillage farmer, there are changes to be made to most fields in most years, as crops are rotated.

I am in the Agri-Environment Climate Scheme (ACRES), so I have to select which fields have been prepared using min-till (no plough) methods and which fields will be used after the harvest for cover crop and overwinter stubble actions.

I also applied for the Straw Incorporation Measure (SIM) and chose which fields to put forward for chopping of straw.

It means a bit of forward planning, as all those latter actions are guided by the cropping plan for 2026.

If I want to plant a winter cereal crop, I can’t put in cover crop or opt for overwinter stubble.

Potatoes and cabbage are sometimes grown in partnership with a neighbouring farmer and straw incorporation is not ideal ahead of those crops. So, I find that the BISS application actually involves a two-year rolling farm plan. That is a good discipline to have to adhere to.

Busy time

In all, there were no less than 10 separate schemes to apply for this week. Apart from the BISS, farmers can apply for the Complementary Redistributive Income Support for Sustainability (CRISS), the Areas of Natural Constraint scheme (ANC), eco schemes, ACRES, the Organics scheme, SIM, the Protein Aid Scheme, the Multi-Species Sward Measure and the Red Clover Measure.

The CRISS loads payments towards farmers with smaller holdings. The ANC payments are to those farming on more challenging land types.

These two schemes help fulfill the Common Agricultural Policy’s (CAP) remit to keep the network of family farms across Europe intact. The other seven schemes all have an environmental focus.

The entire CAP payments system is designed to encourage and support economic and environmental sustainability at farm-gate level. When you stand back and look at it objectively, it’s a remarkable tool.

The CAP is an imperfect system, but it has always been fully costed and fully funded. And that really matters, especially in a sector of small business as volatile as family farming.

The certainty of payments the CAP provides - not just for the year in question, but for years to come - helps farmers survive bad prices and bad weather and is vital in helping them secure finance, both for long-term investment and for seasonal and stocking loans.

I was one of over nine million farmers across 27 countries to make their direct payment application

Every farmer in Ireland - and probably across Europe - would have designed the current CAP somewhat differently, but this week I was one of over nine million farmers across 27 countries to make their direct payment application.

Ranchers, family farms and smallholders from Dingle to Dubrovnik, from Valencia to Vilnius and from Larnaca to Lapland filled out their forms. They did so in the certainty that they will receive payment for each scheme they entered, once they fulfill the obligations they have undertaken.

Nowhere else on earth or in history has there been as complex or as impactful a system of farm supports. It’s true that CAP payments paid better 40 years ago, with more money in a much smaller European Economic Community (EEC).

But the CAP has an undeniable integrity; the intention to keep smaller holdings in place to maintain rural communities is sincere.

And whether she realises it or not, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is messing with that when she threatens to separate the CAP from its funding.

I have no idea what her motivation is, but the proposal for a 'single fund' is disastrous for the European project and for the CAP in particular.

In classic Brussels style, the plan has been leaked and floated for a couple of months now, but it is expected that the president of the European Commission herself will announce the plan to her fellow commissioners next Tuesday.

There will be farmer protests in Dublin and Brussels as she does - the opening salvoes in what could be the mother of all political battles in the storied 60-year history of the CAP.

What is she proposing? Simply, that each country will in future receive a single national envelope each year, to cover all the programmes carried out or supported by the EU.

Ringfenced funding

Presently, CAP funding is ringfenced and agreed for 2021 to 2027, the current Multi-Annual Financial Framework (MFF).

Each country does indeed receive a national envelope, but it’s a dedicated fund for the CAP, both the Pillar I direct payments and the Pillar II rural development programmes.

The CAP programme is agreed to work within the defined budget. Direct payments are completely centrally financed, while the rural development can be co-financed by member state governments.

There are programmes fully funded by member states - the ACRES scheme is paid for through the ring-fencing of 10% of Ireland’s carbon tax revenue, with the intent of helping farmers to reduce the carbon footprint of food production.

The CAP envelope is entirely separate to other EU funding that goes to the member states. There are seven different distinct areas of funding, ranging from the single market, innovation and digital to security and defence to migration and border management.

There are arguments in some quarters that the CAP budget should be cut to help fund those other priorities

The overall EU budget for 2021 to 2027 is about two trillion euro in total, but that seems inadequate to cover the security, defence and migration demands in this drastically changed world and changed Europe.

There are arguments in some quarters that the CAP budget should be cut to help fund those other priorities, but that argument was strongly refuted by Tassos Haniotis on Tuesday night.

Addressing the Irish Farmers' Association's (IFA) CAP meeting on Tuesday night, he pointed out that the current CAP has a budget of €55bn a year. It’s a lot of money, but Haniotis pointed out that it only equates to 0.3% of the EU’s GDP and only 0.6% of the EU’s total public expenditure.

Were the CAP to be cut by 30%, that would only generate 0.1% of EU GDP or 0.2% of the EU nation’s public spending. We would be destroying the supports that underpin food production and rural communities for a relatively tiny gain in public resources for defence, security and migration.

Speaking with authority

Haniotis speaks with the authority of someone who has spent the last third of a century deep in the belly of the beast that is the European Commission. He has spoken in Ireland before as a senior member of DG Agri, the agriculture commissioner’s secretariat.

As the director of strategy and policy analysis, he has a perspective and depth of knowledge of the CAP few could share. And he’s right - robbing the CAP wouldn’t even start to pay the other Pauls; it would be a huge loss for little gain.

I have to say I was struck by his figures for a number of reasons. Not least of these was that if the CAP budget is 0.3% of the EU’s GDP and is also 0.6% of the EU 27’s public expenditure, it follows that total public expenditure in the EU equates to half the GDP of the EU member states.

That’s a sobering thought, even if that is a combination of the collective funds spent by the EU across the member states and each country's own public expenditure.

Haniotis also spoke of how the era of cheap food is effectively over.

The threat is real and imminent

Why am I so concerned about von der Leyen’s single budget proposal? There are three main reasons.

The first is that it will reduce the requirement for programmes and the funding behind them to be fully aligned.

If the CAP is a series of schemes backed by money sent to each member state bundled up with other money, there is the prospect of the Commission and the [European] Parliament delivering programmes that have funds in theory, but in actuality are competing with other programmes for funds that won’t stretch to cover all the EU’s programme.

So the Irish Government might have to choose between cutting ANC payments or scrapping a major road project or perhaps giving the LEADER rural development programme a haircut.

And this would be the type of choice that every member state would face every year. And with different priorities in different countries, the CAP would no longer have commonality. It would just the the Agricultural Policy - the AP.

We all have enough apps in our lives already thanks. Or perhaps we should rename it the Common (Restricted funding) Agricultural Policy - the CRAP.

Secondly, the extra flexibility given to national governments is something to be wary of. On the face of it, Irish farmers could fare well from such flexibility.

Tuesday night’s meeting saw some back and forth on the capacity of the government to make payments to farmers from their own funds, as the Department of Agriculture’s assistant secretary general Sinéad McPhillips explained that the raised maximum per farmer payment limit is compromised by a national ceiling limit which falls way short of each farmer’s personal limit.

Commitment

Ireland does have a commitment to farming that is higher than many member states, I would contend. And we are one of the best-off countries in the EU, so how could more national flexibility be a bad thing?

For an answer, you only have to look back to 2008. As the economy collapsed due to a property bubble exploding, exposing the banking system to catastrophic losses, the Government delivered an emergency budget.

REPS 4, the farm retirement scheme and installation aid were scrapped (although all active participants in the scheme were catered for). The ANC payments so vital to two-thirds of farmers were cut and the Farm Waste Management Scheme payments were rescheduled.

This sudden change in direction to schemes that had been committed to only 12 months earlier in the Programme for Government negotiated with social partners - including the farm organisations - devastated thousands of farm families that had made plans around them, particularly for succession.

There was a generation of young prospective farmers lost to the US, Australia and every corner of the globe. Some returned, many didn’t.

But through all that turmoil, the CAP continued, untouched by the economic chaos that hit every European economy. The Fischler reforms, introduced in 2004, were subject to a health check that only made some cosmetic changes to schemes, which continued largely untouched until the Ciolos reforms were introduced in 2015.

The health check did, by the way, see Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel set out the end of dairy and sugar quotas.

So the CAP provided a haven of certainty for farmers in Ireland and all across Europe through the downturn.

Many people are concerned that Ireland could be on the edge of another economic shock, particularly if the US administration continues with its current destructive policies.

Who wants to see the CAP re-nationalised right now? Not farmers anyway - both IFA president Francie Gorman and policy director Tadhg Buckley spoke strongly against von der Leyen’s plan.

So did Elli Tsiforou, the director of COPA-COGECA, which is the umbrella representative body for over 50 farm organisations and almost as many co-operatives (the IFA and ICOS are Irish members).

Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon also voiced his belief that the CAP and its funding should not be separated. That is the position that is emerging among most, if not all, of the council of agriculture ministers. To round it off, Christophe Hansen, the agriculture commissioner, is also opposed.

I think the spotlight is going to fall on Michael McGrath, the Irish Commissioner, very quickly on this issue. And I think that that's appropriate.

Normally, European commissioners stay in their lane and don't interfere with each other's competency. I remember being in Brussels as part of a delegation of beet growers trying to save the industry in the country in 2005.

Charlie McCreevy, the Irish Commissioner at the time, wouldn't even meet us. He didn't even give us a doorstep. It was something we would have to take up directly with DG Agri.

But this is different - and I'll tell you why. What Ursula von der Leyen is pushing is an agenda where the principle underlying the CAP since its foundation, the principle of commonality, is being removed.

It’s barely short of the re-nationalisation of budgets and it certainly will transfer the delegation of competence in relation to prioritisation of funding back with national governments, with increased flexibility to those national governments to augment any shortfall to fund all programmes that have been created in Brussels.

And for that reason, Michael McGrath has got to get on the pitch - and immediately. He must be the voice for Ireland defending the guiding principles of the European Union against its leading politician.

Christophe Hanson has restated recently that the CAP must have its own dedicated fund and in two pillars. And he seems prepared to fight for that. But he needs help within the commission cabinet and Ireland’s representative must not be found wanting.

An important week lies ahead.

Footnote

One footnote. Last Tuesday’s CAP meeting once again highlighted the ability of the IFA to put a hugely informative event together at a crucial time like we are currently experiencing.

As we all arrived to the Killashee Hotel in Naas, there were protesters from the area bearing witness on behalf of the Palestinian people. They were there because Martin Heydon was attending and they wanted to quiz him on the progress of the Occupied Territories Act.

By agreement on all sides, two questions were put to the Minister - he answered them and the protesters, having made their point, left, meaning there was no disruption to the business of the meeting.

As they left, they were given a warm round of applause by the farmers in the room. The battle to retain the integrity and autonomy of the CAP’s funding is of huge importance, but everyone recognised that it pales by comparison with the unbelievable terror being inflicted on the two million inhabitants of Gaza.

We are lucky to live in this little country, particularly when the weather is nice. This current weather with one or two wet nights a week would be perfect, but we have little to complain about really.