Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I wish to raise a couple of small issues.

I am interested in the idea of the biological treatment of crops. It is striking and something on which I seek the witnesses' comments. Recently I was informed that Ireland has one of the largest uses of fertilisers per hectare for agricultural product in the world. It is something that probably will be unsustainable in the long term and yet farmers are in a competitive world market. How will we deal with that? What solutions could come from that? In that context, I refer to the whole area of energy from land, biodigesters, using the gases that are produced from the bovine sectors and the possibility of them being harnessed in some way. How much research is going into that? It is an area in which Ireland seems to be falling way behind and not keeping up.

Another issue is diseases in crops. I read something interesting recently to the effect that some countries in Latin America had a problem in getting fertilisers and a lot of the pesticides that are commonly used in other places. What they did was to go back to nature by planting other crops around the edges of their fields of oats or barley. This brought in predators, which took care of the issues with which the cash crop had to deal. Is there something there? A hundred years ago, before we had all of this science and so on, farmers had learned, over generations and thousands of years, through nature what resolved these issues. The advent of chemicals has meant that in a lot of cases we have forgotten, collectively, how that can work. Is there much research going into that area now? It is certainly my view and the view of most people that the chemical answers will not always be there for us. A lot of these diseases are becoming resistant to them. Is there a means of going back and finding a scientific way of applying the old system to resolve these issues? If there is, how does it compare? Are we talking about going back to much lower yields or about going back to different breeds and different ways of doing things that would be more labour intensive and possibly less competitive? I seek the witnesses' views in regard to that.