977. Deputy Brian Brennan asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine if he plans to provide additional funding to increase the number of applications approved under TAMS for solar panels on agricultural buildings. [64397/26]

The Targeted Agriculture Modernisation Scheme (TAMS) is a demand-led scheme with a defined budgetary allocation. The budgetary allocation for TAMS 3 is spread over all schemes therefore it is not possible to allocate a budget to each of the eleven schemes individually.

TAMS 3 has been hugely successful to date, with over €190 million issuing to farmers since payments commenced in June 2024. Over the first eight tranches of the scheme, all valid applications received were approved.

However to ensure the available budget for TAMS 3 is distributed fairly over the remainder of the current CAP programming period, it was necessary to limit the number of approved applications per tranche from Tranche 9 onwards by applying ranking and selection criteria to manage the budget to the end of 2027.

Specifically in respect of the Solar Capital Investment Scheme (SCIS) the number of applications and the level of funding provided to date has also exceeded expectations, to the extent that more than 20% of the TAMS budget is being spent on SCIS. To date a total of 3,774 SCIS applications have received approval to proceed with their investment while payments amounting to €38.3 million have issued to 2,046 farmers.

Given the need to manage the remaining budget available for TAMS 3, in recent tranches I have prioritised approvals for core on-farm investments related to farm safety and nutrient storage on the basis of the importance of continued investment in these measures. As a consequence, 100% of eligible applications under Farm Safety and circa 75% of nutrient storage investments have received approval in recent tranches while approvals for other measures have been at lower levels including SCIS applications.