There are two parallel debates taking place in this CAP reform round under the general rubric of targeting, or who deserves support. One issue is around the definition of an active farmer. The other is that support should be targeted on farmers in need. In this post, I want to focus on the changes proposed by the Commission in the way active farmers are defined.
Active farmers in the current Regulation are a sub-set of all farmers. Only active farmers are eligible to receive direct payments (decoupled and coupled payments). While we can use the concept ‘active farmer’ which was introduced in the current CAP Strategic Plans Regulation as a shorthand, its specific implementation has changed in the proposal for the post-2027 CAP.
Active farmers in the CAP Strategic Plan Regulation
Under the current CAP Strategic Plans Regulation, the distinction is made between a farmer and a beneficiary of direct payments. A farmer is anyone who carries on an agricultural activity (where what constitutes an agricultural activity is determined by each Member State based on criteria set out in the Regulation) (Article 3(1) Regulation (EU) 2115/2021). But beneficiaries of direct payments must be active farmers. It is up to Member States to determine who are active farmers, but the basic requirement is to ensure that support goes to natural or legal persons “engaged in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity, while not necessarily precluding the granting of support to pluri-active or part-time farmers” (Article 4(5) Regulation (EU) 2115/2021).
The fact that the legal requirement is “at least” a minimum level of agricultural activity gives Member States leeway to establish a more demanding requirement. But this must be based on “objective and non-discriminatory criteria, such as income tests, labour inputs on the farm, company object and inclusion of their agricultural activities in national or regional registers. Such criteria may be introduced in one or more forms chosen by Member States, including through a negative list disqualifying a farmer from being considered to be an active farmer. If a Member State considers to be ‘active farmers’ those farmers who did not receive direct payments exceeding a certain amount for the previous year, such an amount shall not be higher than EUR 5 000.”
This last sentence may appear counter-intuitive if the purpose of the ‘active farmer’ definition is assumed to be to limit direct payments to those who make a contribution to food production. It states that a Member State can consider anyone who is entitled to a direct payment below a certain figure (which cannot exceed €5,000) to automatically be an active farmer. This points to another objective of the targeting of payments to active farmers which is set out in a recital to the Regulation (see below) that payments can be made to smaller farmers because they contribute to the vitality of rural areas rather than production as such.
Member States also have a second flexibility which is that the obligation that a beneficiary of direct payments must be an active farmer should not necessarily preclude the granting of support to pluri-active or part-time farmers. A plain reading of the text implies that farmers who are not active farmers based on the Member State definition of what is required can still be eligible for direct payment support, if they are pluri-active or part-time farmers.
The relevant recital to the Regulation provides further insight into the motivation of the legislator. Recital (19) reads:
With a view to further improving the performance of the CAP, income support should be targeted towards active farmers. To ensure a common approach at Union level, a framework definition of ‘active farmer’ displaying the essential elements should be set out. Member States should determine in their CAP Strategic Plans, on the basis of objective conditions, which farmers are considered to be active farmers. To reduce the administrative burden, Member States should be allowed to grant direct payments to smaller farmers who also contribute to the vitality of rural areas and to establish a negative list of non-agricultural activities compared to which the agricultural activities are typically marginal. The negative list should not be the only way in which the definition is determined but should be used as a complementary tool to help to identify such non-agricultural activities, without prejudice for the persons concerned to prove that they fulfil the criteria of the definition of ‘active farmer’. To ensure a better income, strengthen the socio-economic fabric of rural areas or pursue related objectives, the definition of ‘active farmer’ should not preclude the granting of support to pluri-active or part-time farmers who in addition to farming are also engaged in non-agricultural activities.
The recital, which provides interpretative context but is not in itself a legal obligation, does refer to allowing Member States to give direct payments to smaller farmers who also contribute to the vitality of rural areas. It also confirms the let-out which allows farmers who do not meet the criteria to be defined as an active farmer to nonetheless receive direct payments provided they are pluri-active or part-time farmers. The implication might be that these will be mainly smaller farms, but this is not a requirement.
This let-out, along with the provision that any recipient of direct payments below a certain limit can automatically be considered an active farmer, opens the barn door to any Member State who wants to extend eligibility for direct payments to virtually any farmer (recall, anyone who engages in an agricultural activity, provided they are not on a negative list). But these are optional flexibilities. The current provisions also allow Member States to determine stricter requirements to be an active farmer if they wish. The upshot is considerable variation across Member States in who is eligible to receive CAP direct payments. Coordination Rural published a blog post in 2022 that set out the minimum criteria used in each Member State.
We need to note a third flexibility available to Member States (Article 18, Regulation (EU) 2115/2021), which allows Member States to set a minimum area and not grant direct payments to active farmers whose eligible area is lower than the minimum area. Alternatively, Member States may set a minimum amount of direct payments that may be paid to a farmer. When setting the minimum area or minimum amount, Member States should be guided by the purpose of direct payments which is to contribute to achieving the objectives of the CAP to which direct payments contribute. A brief summary in the Commission summary overview of 28 CAP Strategic Plans in June 2023 noted that all Member States set minimum requirements for receiving direct payments with most of them setting both an area and a financial threshold of between 0.3 and 4 hectares and between EUR 100 and 500, respectively.
Finally, we can observe that the criterion that determines whether a farmer is an active farmer or not requires the farmer to engage at least in a minimum level of agricultural activity. In the Regulation, this refers to several different dimensions, including “income tests, labour inputs on the farm, company object and inclusion of their agricultural activities in national or regional registers.” For example, an income test might exclude farmers whose income from agricultural activity is less than a specified share of their total income (for example, this criterion is applied in Spain for legal persons only). A labour input criterion might exclude farmers where less than a specified share of their labour input is devoted to agricultural activity.
In practice, Member States have rarely defined an active farmer in these relative terms. Instead, most definitions either base themselves on inclusion in specific national registers (herd register, social security register, stated objectives in a company’s articles of association), and/or manage a minimum amount of land or number of animals, or maintain a minimum stocking rate (this last is a feature of the Irish active farmer definition even though it should be disallowed as a condition for a decoupled payment).
Proposed changes in the Commission proposal
Understanding the changes introduced in the Commission proposal is not easy as they are spread across two Regulations. This fragmentation results in some duplication but also some inconsistencies.
The key point is that the definition of an ‘active farmer’ disappears. Although the phrase ‘active farmer’ appears once in a recital of the draft NRPP Regulation, it has disappeared from the draft CAP Regulation and there is no longer a formal definition. Instead, the thinking behind the definition of the active farmer has now been integrated into the definition of who is a farmer in the first place. There is thus no longer a distinction between being a farmer and being a beneficiary of direct payments. In the new proposal, if you qualify as a farmer, you also qualify as a DABIS or coupled payment beneficiary.
To bring this about, the new definition of a farmer introduces the requirement that agricultural activity is their ‘principal activity’. Whereas, in the current Regulation, Member States can determine who is an ‘active farmer’ on the basis of specific objective and non-discriminatory criteria, these criteria are now used to determine who is a farmer in the first place by virtue of the fact that agricultural activity is their ‘principal activity’. But as with the current Regulation, there is again a let-out for natural persons and small legal persons to be treated as a farmer even though agricultural activity is not their principal activity, provided they are engaged “in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity, as defined by Member States.”
The definition of a farmer is set out in Article 4(3)c of the draft NRPP Regulation as follows:
(c) in the context of the CAP, a farmer is:
(i) a natural or legal person whose holding is situated in the Union and whose principal activity is agricultural activity in accordance with the criteria defined by the Member States in line with this Regulation; or
(ii) natural person or small legal person, whose principal activity is not agriculture, but who is engaged in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity, as defined by Member States.
The changes to note are that, whereas under the current CAP, a farmer is anyone who exercises an agricultural activity, under the proposed Regulation a farmer is anyone whose principal activity is agricultural activity as determined by Member States. But this is qualified by adding that a natural or small legal person whose principal activity is not agriculture but nonetheless engages in at least a minimum of agricultural activity as determined by Member States shall also be considered a farmer.
We thus have a new definition of a farmer that is more restrictive than the current one. But, assuming that Member States would use the same criteria that they currently use to define an active farmer, and use the same criteria to define a minimum level of agricultural activity, to my non-legal-expert eye, there would be no change in the population of farmers who are eligible to receive direct payments.
However, there are subtle legal differences. For one thing, in the current Regulation, the list of obligatory and non-discriminatory criteria is used to establish whether a farmer is an active farmer. Examples of these criteria are included in the text of the Regulation itself. In the proposed Regulation, adherence to these criteria is intended to demonstrate that agricultural activity is the principal activity of the landowner. The concept of ‘principal activity’ is not defined in the Regulation but is left up to Member States to determine. The criteria they might use are now relegated to a recital, rather than being included in the legal text.
It is probable that the reference to ‘principal activity’ will require Member States to tighten the criteria they have used to determine active farmers based on engaging in ‘minimum activity’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘principal’ to mean ‘most important’ or ‘main’. This is a different meaning to ‘minimum’. Despite this, Member States will also need to define a separate set of ‘minimum activity’ criteria to determine if landowners who do not meet the ‘principal activity’ threshold can still be considered as farmers.
There is no longer a reference to allowing Member States to define landowners who are entitled to direct payments below a threshold automatically as farmers, though I guess this could be introduced by a Member State in their definition of a farmer in the CAP chapter of their National Plan. The drive for shorter basic acts has removed much of the clarity that more detailed provisions, while often seen as bureaucratic overreach, provided to Member States as to what measures would be considered legal and what not.
More detailed look at the proposed definitions
This section takes a more detailed look at the framing of the farmer definition in the proposed new legislation. Readers uninterested in the legal details can skip to the final Conclusions.
Those who can benefit from CAP income support is first addressed in the recitals to the draft NRPP Regulation. Recital (44) notes that “CAP support should be focused on active farmers defined in compliance with WTO rules. With a view to further improve the performance of the CAP, area-based income support should be targeted towards farmers who exercise agriculture as a principal activity”.
This is the only reference in the new proposals to the ‘active farmer’ concept. As noted, the concept is not mentioned further in the legal texts and it seems this is simply a hangover from the past.
Recital (45) goes on to note that “For distinguishing beneficiaries in the context of the CAP, the criteria defining the concept of principal activity should include the share of agricultural income within the total income, labour inputs on the farm, company object and inclusion of their agricultural activities in national or regional registers. Member States should be allowed to also use negative lists to identify those applicants who do not meet the definition of ‘farmer’.”
We note that these criteria to define the ‘principal activity’ are exactly the same as those previously used to define an active farmer in the current Regulation. However, as noted, they now appear in a recital rather than in the legal text.
The recitals to the draft CAP Regulation are more general than this. Recital (9) merely states that “Income support allocations should be ringfenced to be used for Income (sic) support for farmers only, to provide stability and predictability for the Union agricultural sector”.
Although the recitals provide useful interpretative information to help in clarifying the legal text, it is the latter which is key. And the legal definition of who can benefit from CAP income support payments is set out in Article 6(5) of the draft CAP Regulation as follows.
“The Member States shall ensure that the support under this Article is primarily directed towards farmers who exercise an agricultural activity on their holding and actively contribute to food security. Small farmers, whose principal activity is not agriculture, but who are engaged in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity, as set out by Member States, shall be considered farmers as well.”
This illustrates the duplication and confusion that has arisen due to the fragmentation of CAP-related provisions across two separate Regulations. The fact that Article 6(5) specifies that DABIS support should be primarily directed towards farmers who exercise an agricultural activity on their holding, while also stating that small farmers who are engaged in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity, as set out by Member States, shall be considered farmers as well, is apparently redundant text.
By the definition of a farmer (NRPP Regulation Article 4), a farmer has to exercise an agricultural activity as their principal activity. This Article also makes clear that natural persons or small legal persons who are engaged in a minimum level of agricultural activity are to be considered as farmers. The one difference with Article 6(5) is that the definition of a farmer allows all natural persons whose principal activity is not agricultural activity to be considered a farmer provided they engage in at least a minimum level of agricultural activity as defined by a Member State. In Article 6(5), it is only small farmers whose principal activity is not agriculture but who engage in at least a minimum level of activity who shall be considered as farmers. This is an example of the inconsistency that arises when the legal provisions are fragmented across different Regulations.
The other new information in Article 6(5) is that the primary recipients of DABIS aid actively contribute to food security. This is not defined, so it will be up to Member States to decide how to interpret this. But I find it hard to see that this gives Member States any additional freedom of manoeuvre that they do not currently have in defining “at least minimum levels of agricultural activity” and excluding farmers from direct payments below a certain area size or level of direct payment receipts.
Conclusions
The ‘active farmer’ provisions in the current CAP Strategic Plans Regulation were hard fought over. The Commission had originally proposed the idea of ‘genuine farmer’ which neither the Council nor Parliament liked. The AGRIFISH Council opposed the whole idea because of the additional administrative work required to determine compliance with the definition. The ‘active farmer’ definition was eventually included in the final act at the insistence of the Parliament, although it failed to get agreement to make the use of a ‘negative list’ mandatory. Given that history, it seems strange that the Commission proposes to remove the definition of an active farmer and instead to revise the definition of who is a farmer.
To my non-legal-expert eye, this change will make no practical difference to who ends up as eligible for the DABIS payment, assuming that Member States use similar criteria that they currently use to define who is an active farmer. But it adds an extra complication to the decision process, as Member States will now have to construct separate definitions of what determines agricultural activity as the ‘principal activity’ and what determines it as a ‘minimum activity’. This seems to be a step backwards in terms of simplification.
In the absence of any impact assessment accompanying the proposal, we do not know what the Commission’s motivation in proposing this change has been, and what improvements or objectives it expects to achieve. Readers are welcome to make their own suggestions in the comments.
This post was written by Alan Matthews.
Photo credit: Belgian farmer, © European Union, 2026 licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
