Professor Gerry Boyle:

Deputy Martin Kenny raised an interesting question. Unless research is used, it is useless. Teagasc conducts research in both agriculture and food. The most significant challenge we have is not so much doing the research but getting it adopted. I have often spoken about two contrasting situations. For example, there was the successful adoption of work we have done along with the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation, ICBF, on the economic breeding index, EBI, for dairy. I consider that to be one of the most successful pieces of research done in the history of agriculture in Ireland. The beginning of that work goes back 20 years when there was a significant problem with fertility in the dairy herd. That is almost resolved now. Since then, we have also introduced genomic selection. We are the second country in the world to do it. A year ago, I asked my colleagues to put some economic numbers on this. Conservatively, they reckon the benefit-cost ratio is 20:1. The EBI has been going up year on year. It is a simple index of the profitability of dairy production. It is going up by the rate of €10 a year.

What is interesting about that is the research is complex. The head of research in Teagasc, Dr. Frank O'Mara, often says that when one looks under the bonnet. it is complicated and one closes it quickly. The implementation is simple, however. We will tell farmers to buy a combination of straws, spread their risks, look at the traits in which they are interested and whether the farmer is involved in liquid milk or manufacturing milk. It is simple and then the advisory service comes in behind that.

On the other hand, although I am forever an optimist, I am disappointed in the uptake of some of the grassland work we have done. It was a massive challenge to get farmers to adopt what are straightforward technologies. We are working on that and have put in a lot of investment at both research and advisory levels. The contrast is interesting. It is probably fair to say that the science is not as involved on the grassland side as it is on the breeding side, yet the uptake has not been as good as we would have liked. We have to look at how we can devise systems. It is a whole-system approach when grassland is used optimally. The farmer has to be linked in as regards his fertiliser and the grass seed company. He has to be capable of measuring the grass and recording the information. There are many elements to it and critical elements may not work well in the system. We are looking at the measurement side at the moment to see if we can encourage companies or one-person operations to provide a service in grass measurement to farmers, creating a new market. That would enable the information to be uploaded to the pasture database. The advisory service could be brought in at that point. Advice in the future will be database-led. The advisor will not have to visit the farmer any more. If the farmer has the information on a mobile phone, the advisor could be anywhere in the world and could look at the grass wedge and talk to the farmer about it.

Increasingly, we are going to have to think about the development of new systems of production. One of the best examples going back a long time is in the mushroom industry, although it has had a lot of trouble more recently with Brexit and everything else and has changed utterly. However, that industry was established purely out of research. It did not exist before a concerted programme of research was put in place to create it. In many respects, that is where we are now. An area that is going to require that kind of system-wide thinking is the future development of the beef system. In the past, there was greater integration between dairy and beef than there is now. The quota intervened and created massive growth in beef. We are going to have to examine how we can achieve greater integration. It will be a challenge because it will not happen through the marketplace. All of the pressures are the opposite there. There is great opportunity for good beef-stock men in the growth of contract rearing of heifers and so on. At the same time, there is a responsibility on all of us involved with the dairy sector to make sure the quality of calf produced can lead to a decent quality, valuable beef animal. The market will not deliver that so there has to be some way of developing the system. I could give other examples. I have seen successful agroforestry development in other countries, which is a new system. In the energy area, the greatest problem in much of the development is that there is no market. The farmer learns how to use biomass to produce energy and then finds that the market does not exist or it highly volatile, and he goes out of business. I am not sure what the answer is but the Deputy has identified an important issue in respect of robust agricultural systems can be created into the future. There are both opportunities and challenges.

Senator Lombard referred to pensions. We are a bit unusual in that the pension comes out of our grant-in-aid. Officials in Departments do not worry about that because the payments come out of central funding, as is the case with many other public bodies. Our pension is a pay-as-you-go system. It operates on the same basis as the rest of the public sector in that the concern around pensions is a wider concern than just Teagasc. Each year, we negotiate with our parent Department on our grant-in-aid for the following year. It is not too difficult for us to forecast retirements and so on. To date, the facts have been responded to appropriately. However, there is a bigger issue around public sector pensions of which I am sure all the members are well aware. In a different life, I certainly had some interest in that.

In the context of Greenfield farm, the Senator identified that there was a significant response on the day of the storm from a number of my colleagues. The Senator mentioned the Phelans and so forth. I would like to think that people in most parts of Ireland would club together in a crisis situation. That is the nature of things. The conditions were atrocious and that is one of the issues picked up on in the report. People truly did go above and beyond the call of duty on the day - I know that phrase is sometimes misused.

The Senator raises a bigger issue in respect of the labour situation and the numbers of cows. There is an acute labour situation on dairy farms. For some reason and oddly enough, not as many issues arose in respect of the farms as was the case last year. We took an initiative last year on foot of a request from the Minister to set up a group to examine the sourcing of labour within and outside the country. One of the biggest problems, which is a fundamental flaw in the model, is that we cannot have untrained people working on dairy farms. The challenge lies in recovering the cost of the training. Teagasc provided a subvention in a small scheme last year. We trained up people who were on unemployment assistance in a couple of colleges. That cost us and we were not able to recover the cost subsequently.