Farmers are being warned that after the long delay in getting some details of Common Agricultural Police reform that they must sort out any excess land entitlements quickly.

Single Payment Scheme (SPS) entitlements become the new Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) on December 31.

And 'surplus' hectares will be extinguished once the 2015 claim is made, advises Marlborough-based rural land use expert Phillip Nicholson, of property consultants Carter Jonas.

SPS entitlements can still be transferred until October 21 - the deadline for submission of the RLE1 transfer form.

“The difficulty most farmers face is that some of the rules surrounding Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs), that form part of the ‘greening’ measures affecting many arable farmers, are not entirely clear,” said Mr Nicholson.

“Under these rules, farmers with more than 15 hectares of ‘arable land’ may have to put five per cent of their arable land in to an EFA.

“The simplest way to do this is to ‘set aside’ five percent of the arable land as ‘fallow’. But care is required to understand both the definition of arable land land and what will qualify as fallow.

“Another option is using hedges as a means of claiming the five per cent EFA.

"However, the rules in relation to hedges are yet to be determined.

"At present it seems clear that if a hedge is bordered directly by arable land in the ownership of one farmer, then the hedge can be claimed.

"However, if the hedge borders permanent pasture, a road, or a neighbour’s land on the other side, it is not clear whether this hedge can be used to contribute to the EFA and, if so, to what extent.

“Further guidance is awaited on this and many other points of detail from DEFRA and so our advice to farmers is to keep things as simple as possible in the first year of the new scheme and plan next year’s cropping on the ‘knowns’ rather than waiting for DEFRA to define the ‘unknowns’.

“In some cases, crop planting decisions will have to be made before the details are determined.

“There is a summary of CAP changes as we understand them at this stage at www.carterjonas.co.uk/cap-changes.

"The essential is to seek early advice on anything of which you are unsure.

"With current gloomy commodity prices matched by forward predictions, no farmer can afford to wait and then find mistakes have been made too late to rectify them.”