Professor Alex Evans:

I will talk a bit about the environment. We do not have any easy solutions either. There is a major challenge around how much carbon it takes to produce a kilogram of beef or a litre of milk. That is a critical question. If more milk is produced, is, proportionally, more carbon and water used? We need to get to a situation where we have a description of the total envelope of megatonnes of carbon we are allowed each year. The question then is how much milk or meat can we produce from that. Increasing efficiency there allows greater production at the same level of pollution, to use that kind of emotive wording. Our milk production going up 22% does not necessarily mean our impact on the environment has gone down 22%. The benefits are coming from more milk per animal. We do have more animals but we do not have the same increase in the number of animals as we have in milk production.

We are also getting better utilisation out of our pastures. I am sure the members of the committee are aware of trying to get tonnes of dry matter per hectare out of the ground and Teagasc's target is to try to get farmers to utilise ten tonnes of grass per hectare. That is very challenging in some parts of the world whereas other people do not find that difficult to achieve. There is a huge education piece there. Our farming structure gives us the potential to do more and the loss of the quotas was symptomatic of that.

We have not started to address the challenge of increasing the carbon fixing abilities of our soils. Understanding the carbon fixing potential of our soil is the first thing that we need to do. Increasing soil capture by 0.4% per year was talked about in the Paris climate discussions in 2015. If we could do that, we would eliminate our climate change challenges. In other words, if people got down to looking at how to increase the carbon capturing ability of the soils they own, they could make a huge difference. That is a challenge facing all of us and I hope we can work on it.

It probably means that it will not be business as usual. Different approaches to how we do agriculture are needed, such as deeper rooting plants and differing tilling methods. People will embrace those approaches more as the challenges become more acute. We may need to grow different kinds of forages on our land to feed to our animals. The tillage sector is definitely having a hard time now but it is acknowledged that we do not grow enough protein crops in Ireland. Maybe we are just growing the wrong plants. That is easy to say when we are sitting in a nice air conditioned room but agriculture is very different around the world. The plants we grow now are very different from what we grew 100 years ago, so what will we be growing 20 years from now? What incentives and market forces will encourage people to change? I think there are outputs there.

Horticulture was mentioned. It is a fantastically successful story in Ireland. It has undergone a transformation in the last decade. I refer to protected crops. There are hectares and hectares of glasshouses in parts of Ireland, in north County Dublin in particular, where fruits and vegetables are now grown on a scale that was heretofore unimaginable.

It is done in a controlled environment, from managing the nutrients going into the plants to managing the diseases of the plants. It is a high-tech industry. Maybe we do not grow all the green vegetables that the Irish people would eat but we certainly are growing an increasing quantity of them.

I would make a another point here. We do make submissions on the CAP, to the Department and to Brussels as well.