Professor Linda Doyle:

I would like to add something that might seem a bit abstract. Reference was made to ownership of GM varieties and other varieties. We are going to see this happening again in the digital world regarding the ownership of farmers' data. The data will be as valuable to people as are the other materials but they cannot see the digital material at the moment and it is really abstract for them. We need to have these conversations all of the time about who owns what. When a person practices some precision agriculture by fertilising a field according to GPS co-ordinates, in many instances it is the company that owns the tractor that ends up owning those data, not the farmer. These are powerful data that can be used in other ways. We need to have the conversation in the physical world and the digital world around this notion of being in charge of our own destiny and about having control. This is why it is a really important question to bring up time and again. It is a timely question to get people to start thinking about this stuff. I spend all of my time in my world talking about things that people cannot see such as wireless communication systems. It is a very important issue and I would love the committee to continue to ask those kinds of questions, especially now with the digital aspect added in. It would be very important for Irish farmers in the future.