Dr. Sinéad Furey:

To try to stem the tide of farmers leaving agriculture, I would like to see an incentivisation effort around food and farming which would give farmers reasons to choose to remain and encourage a new generation of farmers. As members will probably expect me to say, I believe a joint collaborative effort by university and other research and educational institutions could be useful in providing such an incentivisation. This would not necessarily have to be economic. One way forward could be to subsidise educational attainment efforts or repurpose farmers, as it were, to enable them to move into more diverse food processing areas.