Mr. James Nix:

I am careful in the language I use. I do not for a second dispute the fact that there are jobs in processing. My father supplies to Dairygold. We could go through the annual reports and examine the employment figures for those large companies. Mechanisation, automation and computerisation play a very large part in modern processing. We would have to contrast any potential employment alterations or variations there with the potential for added value.

A point that was not mentioned, and it is more than a footnote, is that the pressures on the environment do not extend only to emissions if there was a 50% increase in milk output in terms of volume. Our water quality is under stress in many areas already. If we were to increase the number of cows by hundreds of thousands, that would have consequent implications for water quality in all the areas where production would take place.