A month-long countrywide campaign to brief farmers on the reforms in the Common Agricultural Policy will begin on September 9th, the Department of Agriculture and Food said yesterday.
The campaign will run until October 8th and will feature local and regional meetings which will be addressed by officials from the Department of Agriculture and Teagasc.
The Department said it will be mounting a major operation around the National Ploughing Championships which take place this year in Co Meath from September 23rd-25th.
"We will be holding two meetings on each of the three days to brief farmers," said a Department spokesman yesterday.
He said the meetings would begin following examination of the submissions which the Minister for Agriculture and Food, Mr Walsh, has sought from the public on decoupling beef production from direct payments.
He confirmed that over 100 submissions had been received at the Department but as yet, the main farm organisations had not made submissions for which the closing date is September 1st.
There are growing indications that Irish farmers will opt for breaking the link between farm output and direct payments - the decoupling option.
The president of the Irish Farmers' Association, Mr John Dillon, has said the majority of farmers he has spoken to want decoupling in the beef sector.
This was borne out by a survey published in this week's Irish Farmers' Journal where over 80 per cent of beef farmers, 93 per cent of dairy farmers and a similar number of tillage farmers polled said they wanted full decoupling introduced. The survey of 300 farmers found 60 per cent of sheep farmers favoured decoupling and just over 80 per cent of mixed farmers also favoured full decoupling of all cattle schemes.