Mr. Trevor Donnellan:

I will take Deputy Pringle's last question first. Just last week, we produced our income estimates for 2018 in agriculture and our forecasts for next year. One of the things we highlighted at our conference last week was this progressive improvement over time in the profitability of sheep production. The better sheep farmers, in particular, are returning fairly significant margins at this stage. The difficulty in thinking about farmers transitioning into sheep production is that, compared with keeping beef animals, it is a labour-intensive activity. I had discussions with staff in our own organisation in recent days, especially those who meet farmers and collect economic data from them. One of the points they made was that sheep farmers are increasingly an ageing population. Regarding those farmers, despite sheep production becoming more profitable relative to beef production, we might still continue to see them leaving sheep production. That is purely because it is a labour-intensive sector and, as farmers get older, that aspect of the business makes it unattractive, especially if there is no successor to take over the farm.