Hardship fund announcement due this week

In a draft email Ian has seen, the proposed details of the governments English Dairy Farmer Aid/Hardship fund are concluded and due to be announced this week by DEFRA.

Whilst the final announcement could be tweaked a bit, these are the nuts and bolts:

1. All claims will be based against your February deliveries milk statement.
2. To qualify for any payment, you must be able to demonstrate a minimum 25% reduction in income between the price you received in February to that paid in April. If you can’t show that, it’s a dead duck.
3. You can claim for 70% of your loss. So, the calculation is very simple.
   February milk price (ppl) minus April milk price (ppl) multiplied by 70% multiplied by your delivered volume in April = your claim but its capped at £10,000 maximum.
4. You can only claim for May if you qualified for an April hardship payment. The same criteria and calculation will apply in May as in April.
5. Applications from mid-June which closes at the end of August. Qualifying payments to farmers will be made from the RPA from July.
6. Milk statements will be the minimum evidence required with each claim and will be verified.

DEFRA’s expectation is that the bulk of claims will come from suppliers to Freshways, County Milk, BV Dairies and will at most total 400 and could be a lot less. It’s certainly a lot less than the 2,000 farmers the NFU claimed were “suffering severe financial pressure”.

The Welsh Government are expected to follow with an almost identical scheme and process.

Questions – Will it be the standard litre price, purchasers base price or the total ppl the farmer received?

To be fair to DEFRA, its simple and based on ppl its transparent and really the only way to target aid based on loss of income to the worst affected farmers. The 70% and 25% figures will be debated once confirmed but they appear to be set in stone.