Is this how EU grants should be allocated?

The European Commission for Agriculture and Rural Development has made grants of up to £5,000 available to farmers in Northern Ireland to help modernise their farms, improving animal welfare and farm efficiency. But with just £6m available, many farmers are set to lose out. The farmers whose grant applications are successful will be able to buy from a government-approved list of items such as cow mattresses, creep feeders and computerised livestock identification systems, and must add to the amount of money they are allocated from their own funds. Michelle Gildernew, the Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development, says that this is an “important boost to the economy”, because many of the items on the approved list have been made in Northern Ireland.

So far so good, but there may be a case of government failure in the manner of allocating the grants, which are to be made available to farmers on a first-come, first-served basis today; it is expected that applications will far outstrip the 1,200 grants available, and farmers started queuing outside government offices on Sunday in order to be sure of getting their application in. This hardly fulfils any notion of equity or fairness, as it favours those who are able to leave their farms for 48-hours, who live nearest to the government offices, and who have the necessary equipment to camp out on the pavement for a couple of days.
On the other hand, there is a limit to the funds available, and they have to be allocated somehow; “If we’d done assessment panels it would have been a lot more bureaucratic and a lot more unwieldy,” said Ms Gildernew, and the cost of setting up and administering those panels would likely have reduced the money available through the grants. Some farmers have suggested that applications should have been accepted by post up to a deadline date, and the first 1,200 picked at random. There are two more sets of grants to be handed out to farmers at a later date; is there a more efficient method that could be used for those?