More than 136,000 farmers across the State have until this evening to submit the most important form they have been asked to complete in the last 20 years.
The 2004 Area Aid form, which most farmers have already returned to the Department of Agriculture and Food, will determine the level of farm payments they will receive over the next decade.
Already being referred to as "the form to end all forms", the information on this form will determine the amount of the Single Farm Payment to be received early in 2005 when CAP reforms start.
The "decoupling" of EU farm payments from production should mean a dramatic drop in form-filling, which was a burden on farmers. But for that, Irish farmers last year received €1.7 billion in direct payments, which made up 63 per cent of income from Irish farms.
The Area Aid forms will provide the information on the area of land farmed by the applicants in the years 2000, 2001 and 2002.
Department officials will calculate the average payments made to farmers over the so-called reference years, and this will be divided into the number of hectares farmed over the three-year period.
Rolled into the single farm payment will be all the premiums which used to be paid on cattle and sheep and to tillage farmers, which necessitated farmers filling in 32 forms if claiming for everything on offer.
The promise to farmers is that this is the last time they will be asked to fill in such a complex form, and the breaking of the link with production will mean this will no longer be necessary.
However, there will be one simple form to be submitted annually from 2005 for the Single Farm Payment.
For the first and indeed the last time, some dairy farmers who never received aid before, sheep farmers in the lowlands and farmers with small numbers of animals will be signing up for payments.
The postal strike last month meant the original date of receipt of the forms had to be changed as penalties face farmers who do not submit their forms on time.
The farm organisations issued warnings to their members last night that failure to fill in the forms would mean they would lose 1 per cent of their cheque per working day for 25 days.