New capital grants on offer to farming businesses in Wales

Wales has opened its Small Grants – Environment Scheme for applications to support investment in capital works that improve water quality or reduce flood risk.

Welsh farmers are also being encouraged to apply for the Small Grants – Efficiency Scheme, which supports investment in new equipment and technology to enhance the technical, financial and environmental performance of farm businesses.

The application window for efficiency investment, which has a budget of £5m, opened on 18 May 2022 and closes on 29 June 2022.

See also: Read more articles about grant schemes from Farmers Weekly

The scheme will pay up to 40% of the costs of equipment from a pre-defined list of eligible items.

This list includes livestock and muck handling systems, weather stations, direct drills and computer hardware and software.

The minimum grant available is £1,000 and the maximum is £12,000.

Expressions of Interest (EOI) must be submitted through Rural Payment Wales Online.

If the EOI is successful, farmers will be offered a contract, which they have to accept or decline within 30 days and then they will be given 180 calendar days to purchase and claim the items on their contract.

Water grants

Meanwhile, farmers can apply for a standalone grant of up to £7,500 through the Small Grants – Environment Scheme, which has a total budget of £3m available.

This scheme aims to encourage works including tree and shrub planting, new hedge planting, hedge laying, the installation of rainwater goods, pond restoration, soft engineering of river banks and using hardcore to maintain gateways.

Application process

An EOI window is available until 1 July, after which each project will be assigned a score according to the environmental benefits it will offer.

The highest-scoring projects will be selected and farmers will be notified if their application has been successful.

Target objectives

As part of the scoring process, a number of target objectives have been identified across Wales.

These include habitat improvements for wildlife species, such as water voles, that depend on clean water – which is why options such as installing rainwater goods are available as they help to improve water quality.

Another objective is reducing flood risk in river catchments that are prone to flooding, with these areas benefiting from planting trees that will absorb high volumes of water and therefore reduce the amount of water draining off farmland.