Professor Frank O'Mara:

I am delighted that the Deputy referred to us as young people. As the eldest on this side of the table, I will classify myself as one of the five youngsters here.

The Deputy's first point was a really important one about the whole public discourse around carbon, the role of farmers and so on. I have been in the car a good bit in recent days travelling here and there and I hear one commentator say that we need no more livestock across the world and that we need to get rid of them all, and it varies from that to a little less. We do two things. One, we participate in that debate any chance we get. We are not invited regularly into debates such as that but whenever we are we try to participate. We try to be proactive and put out stuff, whether it is on the RTÉ Brainstorm series, "10 Things to Know About..." or whatever else. When we get a chance, we try. The main thing we do in that space is support farmers to take action around their climate position in a way that allows them to reduce their emissions without affecting their profitability or their food-producing ability. We have a strategy around that. It is a strategy to support farmers. We feel we need to empower farmers. I think the biggest response will be when the emissions from agriculture have dropped. They dropped in 2022 by 1.5%. If we can keep that trend going for a couple of years, that is the kind of answer to people who say agriculture is doing nothing. We are working with as many farmers as we can around that. We are putting high priority on the measures, and there are practical measures that farmers can adopt, whether it is low-emissions fertilisers such as protected urea or replacing fertilisers altogether with clover or whatever it might be. We are putting a lot of effort into that.

We launched earlier this year the signpost advisory programme. That is where we work one to one with farmers, we let them develop a plan to reduce their emissions and we support them to implement that plan. We have signed up about 7,000 farmers to that to date since the summer. We hope to sign up 50,000 farmers to that programme over the coming years. That is our job - to work as an advisory organisation and an educational organisation to support farmers. We participate where the opportunities arise for us in the public discourse in that regard but, as I said, I think farmers are the ones who ultimately will answer that question by transforming their industry, which they are on. I am very optimistic that agriculture can deliver on its targets and I think it can be a leading sector within the country in tackling climate change and emissions. As I said, we have to do that in a way that does not compromise our ability to produce food or farmers' ability to make a profit. That is the journey we are very much on with them.

You mentioned, Chair, the farm zero C project. That is a collaboration with UCD or the SFI-funded BiOrbic centre in UCD that Professor Boland mentioned earlier. It involves us and Carbery, in west Cork, where the idea is to use all the available technologies and try to develop more. Can we make that farm a zero-carbon farm or a carbon-neutral farm? That is a very exciting project. In our own stable we work with 120 farmers right around the country, including in Mayo, where there are exemplar farmers to adopt the technologies that will reduce emissions. We call them signpost demonstration farms. They are all very good farmers and all respected in their communities. We know that farmers learn better from other farmers than from experts such as us. Those 120 farms are like the spearhead of our bigger programme to work with 50,000 farmers. There is a huge amount going on in the agriculture sector. I think it was Senator Daly who mentioned this morning a survey that recognised that and that the general public recognises that farmers are doing a lot. Programmes such as that are contributing to the perception, which is growing, that the agriculture sector is serious about tackling its emissions. We are going in the right direction but have a long way to go yet.