Check now or risk ploughing your crops up

The new "greening" payments will be based on crops that are potentially being planted now.

If farmers find out that their crops are not compliant when they fill in their new Basic Payment Scheme application next year they might have to plough some of them up and start again.

To make the Basic Payment Scheme easy for farmers Guy Banham at our Kettering office has developed a greening calculator.

The calculator takes information from the 2014 Single Payment Claim, including relevant data from Environmental Stewardship Schemes. This is manipulated to take account of the plans on the ground for 2015 and works out the Ecological Focus Area requirement and Crop Diversification parameters for each crop.

This will enable us to advise clients on the CD and EFA requirements for the farm and assess any exemptions and the impact of agri-environment schemes that are relevant to the land.

Clients who have used the calculator have been extremely pleased as within an hour they found out whether or not they would have to make any cropping changes and where to make those changes.

For example, one dairy farming client with permanent and temporary pasture and around 20 hectares of winter barley was pleased to find out that he didn't have to make any changes, even though he was over the threshold for both CD and EFA rules. He had 80 hectares of what is classed as eligible arable land – but because a lot of his cropping was temporary grass he was exempt.

Farmers should also be aware that the 2015 Basic Payment application will have to be made online.

January 2015 will also see minor changes to payments for solar energy but farm schemes should still be viable.

There have always been two tiers of solar projects, small on-farm schemes supported by the Feed-In Tariff and larger schemes supported by Renewables Obligation Certificates. The change to FiTs in January is likely to be a minor decrease.

A 250kW system covering approximately an acre will cost between £250,000 and £300,000 and will provide an income of between £36,000 and £48,000 per annum depending on on-site usage.

* Charlotte Rogerson, chartered surveyor at the Shrewsbury office of Berrys