Rural Payments and Services

Due to an EU regulation update, that was published on the 13 December, we have been required to update the Greening guidance booklet to reflect the compulsory changes.

These are as follows:

• the limit of 30 hectares of arable land is no longer applicable for the exemption from Crop Diversification and EFA for applicants, who have more than 75 per cent of their total eligible land in temporary grass, herbaceous forage or permanent grassland (30 ha rule removed). This will slightly increase the number of farmers exempt from EFA or crop diversification
• leguminous crops added to the list of qualifying land uses for the exemption from Crop Diversification. This improves the consistency between EFA and crop diversification and may result in some additional farmers being exempt from this requirement
• EFA Nitrogen Fixing Crops, the weighting factor for has been increased from 0.7 to 1.0 for 2018
• for the purposes of crop diversification, winter and spring spelt has been added as distinct crop groups. This may help a limited number of farmers to meet their two or three crop requirement

We have also taken the opportunity to update previously notified new option EFA hedge guidance.

Additionally, there are optional greening changes that could be adopted. Due to the timing and potential risk of implementing changes without the full detail being available, we have chosen to defer these optional updates until they can be fully investigated.

Please refer to the updated guidance for full details.

Greening guidance