Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Boyle, Dr. Kavanagh and the ICOS delegation for appearing before the committee. I know Professor Boyle was a few years ahead of me in UCD. He will know Dr. Caffrey very well. I recall clearly what he used to lecture back in the early 1970s that there was one tonne of silage or haylage per adult animal per month. At that time it was roughly a five-month period.

What all the witnesses have said this evening is self-evident and relates to farm-management issues. It boils down to two things - the appreciation of climate change and its significant impact on the capacity to achieve this, as the Chairman mentioned earlier. Deputy Cahill is absolutely right that it will be more difficult this year. The eight-week buffer will require an extra two tonnes of silage or other feed being put aside.

That is it. If that cannot be achieved, let us face the unpalatable truth. There is too much hiding, ducking, diving and everything going on, not by the witnesses, but by people in farming organisations and everything else. There is only one thing to do. Stocking numbers have to be reduced, end of story. If one does not have fodder, one cannot be coming along and whingeing. My own brother is in farming. He cannot be coming along and whingeing next winter. I do not want to start repeating the definition of being a fool. To do something one year is an error, but to repeat it a second or third year is something else. This is obvious. If one was sitting in an exam, perhaps a final year exam in UCD or even an exam for an elective module, this is what one would have to say. The numbers must be reduced, otherwise fodder has to be imported. If it cannot be gotten it is replaced with concentrate, which is a fool's farthing, or it is imported and one starts on the same thing again. ICOS will be looking for another €1.5 million, €2 million or €3 million subsidy to import it from Northern Ireland, if it is available, or from England. That is the only place it will be gotten. It is all correlated to stock numbers. The numbers went up by 300,000 like a shot. There was a perfect storm here. There was climate change, an elongated winter, a decreased period in which to produce fodder and increased stock numbers. Talk about a perfect storm. It was absolutely perfect. Perhaps some of the events could not have been anticipated but we should remember that we were in a not dissimilar position five years ago. Now we have the warning. We had 2013 and the winter of 2018. That is the lesson. We have to learn.

Professor Boyle has hit the nail on the head. It is now a matter of matching the stocking rate to the production capacity of the land. That is now very important. One often sees fields such as one I saw lately. I knew the stocking rate on the field was not high enough to meet the production. The rate should have been adequate and the cattle should have taken up more of the land as a corollary. That is a farm management practice and that has to be addressed. Next winter I will give a pardon, but if somebody comes to me the winter after that there will be no pardon. The Chairman is right, it will not be possible to correct this by next winter. With the help of God the winter will not be as long, but again we are in lottery territory in that regard.

I compliment Teagasc. It is talking about this winter budget. I know some its advisers are working hard on that. Have many participated in PastureBase Ireland? I referred to it a number of times here. I thought it was a very useful tool. Have many of the farmers gotten involved with it? Again the issue of nutrient replenishment is also down to farm management. It is about restoring the particular nutrients that are taken out as a result of crop harvesting. Particularly after the first cut, slurry is judiciously utilised to restore the nutrients that are taken out.

I compliment ICOS. It did a great job. We wish the banks were as reactive as it was. I compliment it. I know it will probably find a little bit of a hole in its balance sheet but it is operating on behalf of its own members, which is great, and it has done well. ICOS tries to be flexible in terms of the cost of credit. How much did discounting on normal pricing cost across the wider co-operative movement across the last six to eight weeks, which was the critical period? I compliment it on the work it was doing. It was a little bit ahead of the curve. It anticipated the things that were going to happen with a little bit more precision because it was working on the issue earlier.

I have a question for Dr. Kavanagh. The Minister was depending heavily on Teagasc to get the predictions right. It is an inexact science. The weather could change tonight. It has changed in the last 24 hours. Neither Teagasc nor ICOS nor anybody else can predict the weather. Nor indeed can the Minister. We cannot lay that with anybody. Had it not been for the wicked period at the end of January and into February, would there have been adequate fodder in the country if it could have been transported from the south or the east to the west or north west? Did Teagasc believe there was adequate fodder? We were given to understand that there was adequate fodder but that then the whole thing blew up and the equations and calculations went out the window. Was that Teagasc's best guesstimate? It has a very widespread network of advisers who work at ground level and at the coalface who would be able to give it their best estimates in that regard. Was Teagasc thrown out of kilter by that sudden event?