Dr. Frank O'Mara:

I will begin by adding to the last answer from Professor Boyle in terms of the carbon footprint of individual farms. As Professor Boyle said, we have been doing this in the national farm survey but because those farms are all anonymised, we cannot discuss any individual farmer's results. However, we will be using the exact same methodology on these 100 farms and it will be great to be able to talk about real-life farms, to have demonstration events on those farms and discuss the actual figures.

To give the committee some sense of it, we have modelled the typical or average suckler farm in the country in the national farm survey and the amount of emissions that are offset by sequestration, according to our estimates, is approximately 50%. Around 50% of emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are offset by carbon sequestration in soils, based on our current estimates of sequestration. We are undertaking a major programme on carbon sequestration in soils. We are setting up the national agricultural soil carbon observatory, a network of very sophisticated measurement towers for measuring carbon changes in soil across the country. We will have about 16 such towers in the network which, for the size of the country, will give us one of the densest measurement networks in Europe, if not the world. As part of the research that will be conducted using that network, we will be looking at whether we can use remote sensing, such as satellite or drone data, to measure or estimate carbon sequestration so that we do not have to do the kinds of detailed measurements that we will be doing on the 100 farms in the signpost programme. Hopefully, we will not have to do that on every farm in order to get estimates of carbon sequestration.

Committee members are probably well aware of the carbon leakage issue and what it means but briefly the idea is that if we cut back on our production of food, particularly milk or meat, and the shortfall is filled by some other country which has higher emissions, there is no gain. Indeed, there is actually a loss to the overall system. This is a very real issue because Irish milk and meat has a very low carbon footprint. Ireland has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world for milk and the footprint for our meat is also very low. Therefore, if our production is replaced by countries that have a higher carbon footprint per kilo of milk or meat, then the world loses out in terms of the level of emissions entering the atmosphere. That is the carbon leakage argument but at the same time, the agreements we have signed up to contain individual country targets. We must live within those individual country targets and that is the conundrum we face. In our approach to this issue, we are always trying to find ways to reach our environmental targets without negatively impacting on food production from Ireland.

The question was asked as to what a stable national bovine herd means, which is often spoken about in the context of methane emissions. It means that we have stable emissions of methane or that we have stable numbers of animals. Obviously, different animals produce different amounts of greenhouse gases so the logical conclusion is to talk about stable methane emissions. The marginal abatement cost, MAC, curve that we produced in 2018 around greenhouse gas emissions set out scenarios for how the national herd might develop over the next decade. Broadly, there would be a stable overall number of animals in the country. We envisaged some increases in dairy cows and some reductions in suckler cows over that period, with one more or less counteracting the other.

That is the stable bovine herd.