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Almost a quarter of the €20m allocated to the Beef Environmental Efficiency Pilot (BEEP) will not be drawn down by farmers.
BEEP required suckler farmers to weigh a cow along with her calf and submit the data to ICBF in return for €40/calf. The average payment per farmer is just shy of €1,000.
To date, €15.31m has been paid to 16,424 farmers in the scheme.
This represents 99.5% of those who carried out the required actions according to figures from the Department of Agriculture released to the Irish Farmers Journal.
The Department also confirmed the total funding paid out would be approximately €15.4m. This leaves €4.6m unspent.
The scheme, announced 14 months ago in Budget 2019, had originally targeted 500,000 suckler cows but attracted just 385,000.
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