Dr. Andrew Cromie:

My colleague has mentioned the exported animals. In the past, we have endeavoured to pick up this data from other countries, including Italy and Spain. The reality is that they simply do not have an infrastructure similar to that of the cattle breeding database. Ireland is in the very fortunate position of having all the meat processing and mart data collected in one central database. I assure the committee that this is not the case in Europe.

Whenever we endeavoured to get that data, there were blank, puzzled looks and we were asked how they would possibly do that. As a consequence, we redoubled our efforts to collect data in Ireland on calf quality, mart price per kilo, and mart weights. We encourage farmers that are exporting animals to record that data directly.