Development of small farms — the DR-14 code is absent from AFIR’s catalogue, and the published route for a small holding is sub-measure 4.1

The DR-14 code returns a 404 on the details-and-annexes address, exactly like DR-12, while the pages for DR 15, DR 16, DR 19, DR 20, DR 22, DR 23, DR 26, DR 30, DR 33 and sub-measure 4.1 open normally. None of the funding sections — agricultural holdings, fruit growing, agri-processing, producer groups — contains an intervention named Development of small farms.

We do not conclude that the intervention was cancelled. The absence of a page is not a published decision, and the strategic plan can be amended. The useful conclusion is simpler and firmer: there is no guide today for a small farm to build a dossier under that code, so planning is done on the interventions that do have one.

We have also withdrawn from this page an earlier claim that a submission round ran in the spring of 2026. We could not confirm it on the agency portal: on the verification date, the sessions page carried a single launch announcement, for the Energy Scheme. We do not confirm rounds we cannot read at source.

The purpose is to support investments that raise the competitiveness of agricultural holdings through high-performance machinery and equipment, and one stated objective is restructuring small and medium-sized holdings into commercial farms. Beneficiaries are farmers — authorised natural persons, individual and family undertakings, groups of natural persons, legal persons — companies, agricultural cooperatives, research and development institutes and stations, joint-ownership associations and other associative forms of land ownership, producer groups and organisations.

Support runs from 30% to a maximum of 90% of eligible costs, across three size tiers. For crop farms between EUR 8,000 and 250,000 of standard output and livestock farms up to EUR 500,000: 50%, not exceeding EUR 350,000 for simple purchases, or EUR 1,000,000 for simple purchases specific to sugar beet. For crop farms between EUR 250,000 and 500,000 and livestock farms between EUR 500,000 and 1 million: still 50%, not exceeding EUR 400,000. Above those thresholds the rate drops to 30%.

For cooperatives, producer groups and producer organisations the rate is 50%, not exceeding EUR 1,500,000, regardless of the type of investment or the size of the farm. The intensity may rise by 20 percentage points — capped at a combined 70%, or 90% for associative forms — for investments by young farmers up to the age of 40, for agri-environment and organic farming, for areas facing natural constraints as marked in the annex to the guide, and for collective investments.

We start from what hurts: losing track of treatments, receipts that go missing, being unable to tell whether a crop finished in the black or the red. A record-keeping application solves those three problems with an ordinary phone and a few minutes of discipline a day — no server, no per-user licences, no week-long training.

For crop holdings we configure records by plot — operations, inputs, harvests; for livestock, a register by animal — treatments, births, output. At the end of the year the cost and the result appear for each crop or animal category, instead of a notebook nobody can decipher. Sensor equipment rounds out the picture only where the data genuinely feeds a decision.

Sub-measure 4.1 finances machinery and equipment. Whether a farm record-keeping application falls into an eligible cost category is read in the sub-measure’s applicant guide and its eligible-cost annex, not in a supplier’s offer. We prepare the specification and the budget; the guide and the evaluator confirm the classification.

One detail that matters at verification: the agency publishes reference prices among its working instruments, and a budget line that departs from them needs written justification. The budget we hand over is itemised by function so it can be compared line by line, rather than a round total for an unspecified IT solution.

We declare no expense eligible, we do not prepare the funding application or the business plan, and we do not promise the project will be selected. We stop at the specification, the budget, the implementation, the training and the acceptance documents.

The limit that costs us money: for a small farm we often recommend a subscription application instead of custom development, even though the second would mean a contract several times larger for us. A ten-hectare holding does not need software built from scratch, and an oversized system goes unused after the first season — which, at a durability check, is the farmer’s problem, not ours.