DR-12 setting up young farmers — the code is absent from AFIR’s catalogue, and the published intervention is DR 30, worth EUR 70,000

Three checks, all on the agency’s own portal. First: the details-and-annexes address for DR-12 returns a 404. Second: the agricultural-holdings section lists DR 20 for livestock, DR 26 for irrigation, DR 30 for setting up young farmers, sub-measure 4.1 for simple machinery purchases, DR 16 for vegetables and potatoes and DR 19 for non-productive farm investments; fruit growing has DR 15, processing DR 22 and DR 23, producer groups DR 33. Third: the submissions page carried a single launch announcement.

Interventions DR 01 to DR 11 do exist, but they are something else: agri-environment and climate, organic farming, animal welfare and compensation for areas with natural constraints. They are not investment interventions and carry no business plan, so there is nowhere in them for a software component.

What this means and what it does not: the DR-12 code cannot be used as a planning reference today, because it has no page, no guide and no session. It does not mean the code was cancelled or cannot appear in a later version of the strategic plan — the absence of a page is not a decision.

The stated purpose is attracting and supporting young farmers and other new farmers and facilitating business development in rural areas, and the objective is the young farmer’s installation as head or manager of an agricultural holding. Beneficiaries are natural persons registered and authorised under Romanian emergency ordinance 44/2008 — authorised natural persons, individual and family undertakings — plus sole shareholders and directors of limited liability companies, and majority shareholders holding an absolute majority of 50% plus one, together with their directors.

The support is EUR 70,000, granted over a maximum of three years as a lump sum in two instalments: 75% on signature of the financing contract and 25% depending on correct implementation of the business plan. Mountain-area classification is evidenced through the list of administrative-territorial units annexed to the guide.

The documentation on the intervention page carries dates worth checking before you start: the applicant guide for DR 30 is dated 17.10.2023, the application form 22.11.2023, and the agency separately publishes an erratum to the guide and to the project evaluation sheet E 1.2. Read the erratum first, otherwise you work from text that the same page has already superseded.

The business plan is not written freely. The agency publishes two distinct model templates — Annex 2 for the national, non-mountain allocation and Annex 2 ZM for the mountain allocation — and the choice between them follows Annex 4, the list of administrative-territorial units in the mountain area. A plan written on the wrong template is a formal defect discovered late.

The document we open first when software is on the table is Annex 2.1, examples of investments that can be made through DR 30, with the technical fact sheet in Annex 5 completing the picture. Annex 8 carries the instructions on avoiding artificially created conditions in accessing support — a short text worth reading before any arrangement between related companies.

Because the support is a lump sum, every euro spent on software is a euro that does not reach production. As an indication, for a holding at the start the digital component sits in the EUR 1,000–5,000 band for basic record-keeping and in the EUR 5,000–25,000 band for process digitalization, per our cost guide.

The second instalment, the 25%, depends on correct implementation of the business plan. That changes the delivery order: the digital solution has to be running and documented at the moment of the check, not merely invoiced. We hand over acceptance reports and technical documentation at delivery, precisely so the evidence exists before it is asked for.

We do not draft the business plan, we do not prepare the funding application, we do not calculate scores and we do not confirm that an expense is eligible — those belong to the agricultural consultant, to the intervention’s guide and to AFIR’s evaluation. We guarantee no project’s selection.

The limit that costs us: we do not issue an offer before seeing the holding’s economic size and the objectives in the plan. Inside a EUR 70,000 lump sum, an oversized software component looks good in the offer and bad on the farm, and at the price-reasonableness check one unjustified line damages the whole budget. We prefer a smaller, reimbursable budget, even when that means a smaller contract for us.