Mr. Jim Mulhall:

I thank the Chairman for his time and questions. I am farming on the outskirts of Kilkenny city. I am a third generation milk farmer and I hope there will be a fourth generation. I thank the committee for the questions and I will offer some replies. Mr. Arthur covered some of what I had planned to say. Deputy Ó Cuív asked about the supply of milk and why they can do it cheaper across the water and in the North.

We are all family farmers and interested in family farms and the social structure in rural Ireland. We need to stay in business. Mr. Hannon has said he buys and shops locally; that is how he operates.

We do not need to tell the committee about rural depopulation. In England there are 20,000 fewer farmers today than there were in 1996. Farmers have scaled up to the point where between 400 and 600 cows is commonplace. I was on a farm in Wales last year which had 1,600 cows. The scale has gone bananas. These guys have to survive on a margin of 1 or 2 centilitres. That is how they can supply so cheaply. We could not survive on a margin of 2 centilitres. We operate on an average farm size of 90 cows. We are on a different playing field. Family farms are much smaller here than in the United Kingdom.

Senator Mary Ann O'Brien has suggested we are powerful people, but she must be an alien from Mars if she thinks that. We have absolutely no power. It is a cliché to say we are price takers, but that is what we are. We go to the processor and fight and argue over half cent here or there, but our prices have not inflated during the years. It is soul-destroying. I am a young farmer with a young family and would like to think the next generation will be able to farm. We cannot switch to spring milk production because we work on a small land base - five cows to the hectare. If tradition pays the bills, ours is a traditional liquid milk farm.

We have no problem in producing a high quality product. Liquid milk is the highest quality dairy product one can get. Someone has said the sod was turned at Belview last week. The point is fast approaching where it will be more economically viable for us to export our dairy products than to put them in the shop half a mile down the road. Already 85% of our produce is exported and that figure will expand under Harvest 2020. Where is the logic in the fact that it pays us better, although we talk about food miles and carbon footprints, drying it, putting it in a truck and shipping it to the other side of the world rather than having it collected, boiled, skimmed and put on a shelf half a mile down the road? There is a problem in that regard. I do not know how we will solve it, but many people and families will go broke in the meantime. I thank the committee for its time.