Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I have been on the record a number of times on this but I am happy to reassure farmers again that there is nothing to fear in the baseline rationality around GAEC 2. Farmers can continue to do all of their normal farming activity on a day-to-day basis. That is not going to be undermined by this. It is just a baseline requirement for the basic income support process, or what farmers would know as the single farm payment. I know there are a lot of concerns around this. We had to have a minimum controllable area, which we can justify to the Commission that we are able to monitor activity on. That was the land parcel identification system, LPIS. With that, we set a baseline figure using the Hammond Teagasc map from 2009 as the most accurate way of doing that. This was a baseline figure of at least 50% peat in the LPIS for it to come in under GAEC 2. That brought in some mineral soils - about 100,000 ha - but if we did not have that and if there had been any peat in the LPIS, it would have brought in 880,000 ha of mineral soils. I can expand on that further later.

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