A few weeks ago, I came to a shocking realisation. After 6 years of writing about the ins and outs of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – the politics, the people, the policy, the reform(s), and every angle in between – I had never actually seen the CAP subsidy application form.
If even I — a self-confessed CAP nerd — had never laid eyes on a subsidy application form, I’d be willing to bet that most people outside farming circles haven’t either. Yet that hasn’t stopped Brussels at large from weighing in on the debate about red tape and bureaucracy in agriculture.
It’s become almost gospel: farmers are drowning in paperwork, and the system must be streamlined. This narrative underpins the European Commission’s ongoing crusade to streamline the CAP, pruning its green shoots along with what it considers its deadwood policies.
But French farmer Mathieu Courgeau – who is also a member of ECVC and co-President of Collectif Nourrir – tells a different story.Mathieu has co-managed an organic dairy farm near Nantes for the past 15 years with his cousin, looking after around 110 heads of cattle on 120 hectares, producing around 400,000 litres of milk a year. This puts his farm around the average size for the region – and, like the average French farmer, Mathieu is also “very dependent” on CAP subsidies.
Today is the deadline for submitting the form in France, and together, we’re going through his CAP application; me, dialling in from the seat of power that decides how to portion out a third of the EU budget to farmers, and him, on one of the roughly 6.5 million farms across Europe at the receiving end of this decision.
So what’s it really like to fill out a CAP application?
So what does it look like from the farmer’s side, the real, practical process of how the money lands in their hands?
We begin working through Mathieu’s CAP application page by page on Télépac, the French government’s online portal for EU farming subsidies. The interface seems functional but tired. “Not very intuitive, but not very complicated either,” Mathieu shrugs.
While many farmers now outsource this process to advisors or agricultural associations, Mathieu handles it himself. It’s partly to save money, partly to stay in control, but mostly because finding support to navigate the paperwork has become increasingly difficult.
“My management centre doesn’t want to handle CAP declarations anymore,” Mathieu tells me. The reason? Insurance costs have become prohibitively high — a problem that’s only grown over the years.
This isn’t something Brussels directly controls. While the CAP does include provisions for funding of advisory services, it’s up to member states to decide how much support to offer farmers.
So what is it really like to fill out these famous forms? Stressful, as a lot weighs on getting it right, but again not that complicated, according to Mathieu.
“It’s an important moment because financially, it has a big impact, so it’s a time when you have to be really careful not to make a mistake, so in that sense it can be quite stressful,” he says, adding he also helps his neighbours to do it. That’s why there should be “much more human support for farmers,” he says.
This is clearly not Mathieu’s first rodeo. He moves through Télépac with practiced ease, navigating a maze of tick boxes and drop-down menus peppered with more acronyms than a Brussels policy brief.
But he breaks it all down into bite-size pieces and the little letters start making more sense, even to my untrained eye. He also points out that, as a certified organic farmer, he has a slight advantage: some parts of the application are smoother thanks to automatic eligibility for certain schemes.
Moving goalposts
But for Mathieu, there’s something much more stressful than filling out his CAP form: keeping up with the moving goalposts of the EU policy decisions.
“It’s been changing all the time, almost every year, so you never really know what to do or what not to do,” he points out. This means farmers “no longer really know what we are allowed to do or not do, in the end”.
Just the day before our Zoom meeting, the Commission once again announced a raft of “simplification” (read: deregulation) changes to the CAP – and straight away it has ripple effects. “I don’t know if it’s going to affect that application… well, yes, it definitely will. It has repercussions,” he says, already unsure of how he might navigate these changes and what new challenges this will throw up.
Combined with the lack of support for filling out the forms, this constant policy turbulence is causing serious stress in farming communities, he warns.
Birds-eye view
He carries on clicking through to the next pages, and suddenly I’m looking at his farm from a birds-eye view – a multicoloured patchwork of fields, hedgerows, ditches and trees, as seen from a satellite.
These invisible ‘eyes in the sky’ snap photos every five days to monitor what’s growing in each plot. Every five days? I ask. “That’s what they tell us,” Mathieu replies. The satellites measure the wavelengths reflected by the vegetation, and by combining these images with AI, the system can check whether the CAP declarations match what’s actually happening on the ground.
And how does he feel about being watched in this way?
Mathieu explains that before satellites, field checks reached only about 5% of France’s agricultural land — already five times the European average, where just 1% of farms are inspected on the ground annually. Thanks to satellites, theoretically 100% of farmland can be monitored, offering a stronger oversight of public funds. Mathieu himself has never been subject to an on-the-spot control, and says it’s barely a topic of conversation among his neighbours.
Still, he doubts the technology’s value for the cost involved. “It’s a lot of money to set up this high-tech system for an efficiency I’m not sure I share,” he says, adding he doesn’t believe many farmers are trying, or managing, to cheat the system.
He also acknowledges the psychological weight this constant surveillance places on some farmers. He shares a telling story from his own farm: after signing up for an eco-scheme on permanent grasslands, he didn’t fully grasp the restrictions and began scraping the plot to prepare for maize, only to realise the area was supposed to remain untouched.
It will grow back, but the incident made Mathieu “a bit scared” he might lose that money. He points out that it’s much harder to “talk with a satellite and tell him what happened”.
The CAP ‘trap’
I put the question to him whether the administrative load was proportional to the outcome. No, says Mathieu. “I get far too much money for the work involved,” he says.
There’s a pause. I ask him to repetez s’il vous plait (the interview is in French, and I’m wondering if it’s my rusty compréhension that is the problem here). “I receive far too much money,” he says again. This time, I’m sure it can’t be my French that’s the problem.
Mathieu receives around €40-50,000 in CAP subsidies. For this, he estimates that he spends around 2 hours a year on his CAP paperwork. “That’s a pretty good hourly rate, no?” he asks. As a freelancer, I certainly can’t argue with that.
I ask him to elaborate, and he points to the “trap of the CAP” – that is to say, his subsidies are proportional to the size of his farm, which is quite large by EU standards.
On the other hand, Mathieu points out that with today’s market conditions, it would “not be possible” to earn a living without CAP support. “So in fact, we still have this problem of dependence on support because the price of milk isn’t sufficient,” he explains, adding that he makes a “decent living, nothing more.”
So what would a fairer system look like? “I’d prefer to receive just €10-15,000 in CAP support but have the milk price be 10 cents higher — that way I’d be properly paid for my work,” he says.
In his view, CAP subsidies are “not completely illogical,” since farmers provide valuable services like maintaining landscapes and planting hedgerows. But it’s clear for Mathieu that farmers are “too dependent on subsidies, and it’s a real problem”.
So what is the way forward, according to Mathieu? “The EU absolutely needs to rework the market regulation mechanisms to ensure that farmers are paid correctly,” he says, stressing this must take centre-stage in the policy debate.
He also emphasises the need for a “better distribution” of CAP subsidies to weight funding towards smaller farms. Currently 80% of CAP funding goes to only 20% of farms. “When I compare it to my neighbour who grows vegetables, who has zero — it’s unfair,” he points out.
If not, the outlook is not rosy for the sector. “I’ve been a farmer for 15 years, and in that time, there are plenty of farms around me that have already disappeared. And the remaining farms are just getting bigger,” he warns.
In the end, it’s not the paperwork that’s drowning farmers — it’s the system. And unless something changes, no amount of ‘simplification’ will keep Europe’s small farms from slipping through the cracks if rules keep shifting and support keeps shrinking. Satellites may scan every field from space, but the real pressure is still very much felt down on the ground.
This article is produced in cooperation with the
Heinrich Böll Stiftung European Union.
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