A new Teagasc Advisory Strategy is being piloted in two of its advisory regions from January this year. Head of the Teagasc advisory programme, Tom Curran said; “Following a major review of how we deliver advisory supports to our farmer clients we have developed a new strategy which, we believe, will enable us to deliver a better service to farmers.”

He said; “The amount and complexity of schemes has greatly increased demands on both farmers and advisors in recent years. Our staff have worked very hard to keep up with this workload and this has reduced the time they have for technical on-farm advice. We are keen to address the strong feedback from clients highlighting the need and the benefits to being able to retain and strengthen a high quality technical and farm business advisory support service to clients and to the wider farming sectors.”

To address the challenge of meeting both the schemes and technical needs of our clients Teagasc has established a new national Schemes Support Unit. This new unit is being headed by Aidan Murray. The function of this unit it is to improve the supports to advisors around schemes service delivery and to support frontline advisers to continue to provide this service to clients.

Teagasc will be assigning some advisors to focus and specialise on supporting scheme services with clients, thus allowing a cohort of advisors to be more focussed on technical and farm business development. This is an important development to provide opportunity for advisors to become more specialised around the ever-expanding complexity and volume of scheme work, whilst also protecting the time of other advisors to specialise and focus on technical advice to farmers.

The new Advisory Strategy is being piloted in the Wicklow, Carlow, Wexford Teagasc advisory region and in the Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim advisory region. Letters are being posted to Teagasc clients outlining the changes in the new strategy and their designated advisor. The impact on farmer clients will be minimal as clients will continue to retain a main point of contact with Teagasc through a designated advisor. The difference for clients may arise where in some cases, the client is referred to another advisor for specialised tasks around schemes. From a client perspective, this is similar to how some of the work with schemes and nitrates derogations works has been provided previously.

Enterprise Advisors

An Enterprise Advisor will be allocated to clients who want to keep improving the technical performance, efficiency, productivity and growing their farm business. From now on in the two pilot regions, these clients will have a main point of contact as an Enterprise Advisor, who will focus primarily on technical advice, production and farm management needs. Discussion groups will also be mainly facilitated by these Enterprise Advisors. Specialised Scheme Advisors will work closely alongside Enterprise Advisors to provide schemes and regulation support to these clients.

Farm Advisors

Farm Advisors will continue to support farmers who rely on schemes for a significant portion of their farm income in addition to the technical service they require. Farm Advisors will continue to be the main point of contact for these clients, and will continue to service clients directly around schemes and associated technical advice – similarly to how many advisors and clients already work together. Maintaining a cohort of Farm Advisors puts a strong emphasis on ensuring that scheme benefits are maximised while supporting continuous improvements in efficiency and productivity on farms.

Tom Curran said; “This is an exciting new direction for our clients and staff and I’m confident that this new service will be really positive for our clients. This exciting new development is a major step forward for the long-term future of the Advisory Programme in ensuring that the service continues to support the long-term development of agriculture and of sustainable farm businesses into the future. Rolling it out initially in two pilot regions is an important part of the management of this change across the Advisory programme in order to ensure these changes are implemented in a way that maximises the benefits for clients”.

Ends.