In a steady trickle they came yesterday with their envelopes to the Department of Agriculture offices in Portlaoise, where a major operation to ensure all of Ireland's farmers get their EU entitlements has been going on.
And with the forms in the brown envelopes delivering an average of €15,000 each year per farmer over the next seven years, the trip to the Midlands was well worth it for those who made the journey.
The Portlaoise offices of the department have been the nerve centre for the processing of the new EU single payment to farmers, which now incorporates all seven schemes farmers applied for over the last 10 years.
Bernie Brennan and Valerie Kieron, the higher executive officers in charge of the Portlaoise operation, reckoned that over the previous five days, 10,000 farmers had been delivering their forms each day to department offices across the country and to the centre in Portlaoise.
"It was very busy here yesterday. They were coming all the time and there were a lot of queries to be dealt with but we coped," said Ms Brennan.
"We sent out 160,000 forms and up until this Sunday morning, we had received around 110,000," she said.
"We don't expect to get all 160,000 returned because there would be duplication, say where someone had rented land now owned or rented by another farmer," she said.
She urged farmers to help elderly neighbours fill in the form and promised that all help would be given before the shutters come down on the scheme at midnight tonight.
"From then on, farmers lose 4 per cent a day of the entitlement won for them by the department from Brussels," she said.
There was a lot of praise for staff from those dropping off their forms.
John Brennan, a young part-time farmer from the Carlow/Kilkenny border, had driven to Portlaoise because the team had alerted him to the fact he had not claimed for land which he should have.
"They called me and I am over here to change the form because the land which I now farm was being farmed by someone else in 2000-2002, the years on which the claims are based," he said.
Michael Houlihan from Rathdowney was dropping in the form for his parents and said that he had been impressed with the way the system had worked.
A Wicklow farmer who declined to give his name, joked "It's tough up in them ould hills," said he had been ironing out difficulties with the form and had worked it out.
Most of the farmers who turned up at Portlaoise yesterday were part-timers who, like one Castlepollard man, could not get time off to put in the vitally important form during the week.
"It was a godsend that the offices were open this weekend because if they had not, I would not have been able to find time to file my claim," he said.
The office remains open until midnight tonight.