Ireland's Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine (DAFM) is inviting tenders for a four-year Area Monitoring System (AMS) service contract valued at an estimated €8 million, Agriland's Aisling O'Brien reports.

The AMS regularly observes, tracks and assesses farming activity on land parcels using data from the EU's Copernicus Sentinel satellites or data of equivalent value. Under the current Common Agricultural Policy every member state must use such a system to check compliance with area-based farm schemes, and DAFM is monitoring all of its area-based schemes this way in 2026. Where the system finds a parcel has not met a scheme's conditions, payments may be reduced and penalties may apply.

The service will have to cover around 1.3 million land parcels over roughly 4.5 million hectares, including 1.1 million hectares of permanent pasture parcels, 100,000 hectares of permanent crops and 200,000 hectares of arable parcels. A full and functional service must be running by 15 May 2027, with the first national monitoring results due in mid-June 2027. Tenders close at 5pm on 7 October 2026.

Because the current CAP programme ends on 31 December 2027, the department expects the contract to run into the transition to the next CAP, and says the monitoring requirements are likely to change, though they are not yet clear.

The system is already busy. DAFM sent more than 6,000 AMS notifications to farmers this year: 1,447 in June for a possible artificial surface, such as a house, farm road or building, on a claimed parcel; 3,222 in mid-July for possible wrong crops or no sign of farming activity; and 1,413 in August, which also flagged possible multiple crops, ineligible areas and missing winter bird food required under the ACRES agri-environment scheme.

Photo: Sentinel Hub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Source: Agriland