NFU AND Defra officials met at a Teesdale farm last Friday to discuss the new "broad and shallow" or "entry level" pilot scheme, rewarding good environmental practice, which opens in May.

Barnard Castle has been chosen as the upland area for the pilot and Defra hopes to get about 50 farms to join the scheme.

Farmers joining the pilot will have to sign a five-year contract and the scheme is expected to go nationwide in 2005.

The meeting was held at Geoffrey Wilson's Hill House Farm at Marwood, near Barnard Castle. Mr Wilson is a former NFU chairman for the area and has been part of the steering committee for the scheme.

Payments from the scheme are based on a points system involving the amount of land on each farm - excluding roads and developed land - with points awarded for maintained features such as hedges, stone walls, archaeological features, ancient boundary trees and woodland, rig and furrow land and wetlands.

Those who reach their points target will receive £30 a hectare (£12 an acre) or £12 a hectare (£4.85 an acre) paid annually over the whole holding. Unenclosed upland areas will be paid at a rate of about £12/ha (£4.85/acre). As a simple rule, payment in pounds will be equal to target points.

It is expected that land managers with existing agri-environment schemes such as the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, Environmentally Sensitive Area or the organic farming scheme, will be eligible to apply for the entry level scheme on land that does not receive funding from these sources.

Defra's Neil Clark said: "We expect this scheme not to need creation, but to reward farmers for the environment that they have created in the first place."

But John Bell, NFU chairman for the Barnard Castle area, was sceptical about the scheme being beneficial to all farmers. "The idea is that this will take the place of the ESA and Countryside Stewardship Schemes," he said. "It is trying to cover all farmers, whereas the ESA was targeted at hill farmers and was more appropriate.

"It is probably a good attempt at a scheme to cover the whole country, but it is going to be more applicable in some areas than others. I think it is trying to achieve the impossible."

Mr Bell, who farms at Valance Lodge between Middleton-in-Teesdale and Alston, added that he doubted whether he and others with similar farms would get enough points to qualify for the scheme.

"I am at 1,300ft and most of it is open land," he said. "The rules of the scheme say you get points for things like walls, trees and rocks but it's not going to be easy to set up on the fell tops."

Mr Wilson said he expected to qualify for the scheme, but doubted the financial benefits. "We are going to have to join the scheme just to try and maintain our income," he said, "but I calculate that I'm going to lose money. There again, I'll lose money if I don't join it."

John Seymour, who farms at Stokesley and is chairman of the NFU's parliamentary, land use and environment committee, said: "We are talking to Defra to develop the scheme and, to be fair to them, they are involving us very well.

"One of the problems with existing environment schemes is they have got huge administration costs. The Countryside Stewardship Scheme has administration costs of 30pc and our target for this scheme is 8pc. It will only work if we can keep costs down and keep it simple to cut out bureaucracy as much as possible.

"We want to tie it in with the IACS system. Farmers can enter their details of the entry level scheme and get paid at the same time as they get their IACS money."

Farmers and land managers in the pilot area will be invited to a launch meeting on Friday, March 14, where they will be able to learn more about the scheme. Application packs will be available from the launch date.

The closing date for take up of the pilot scheme is the end of May and the first payments are expected to be made in February next year