Professor Gerry Boyle:

I take the Senator's point about consumption-based taxes. I should have added that they are not on the table at present and are unlikely to be for some time, if at all.

She raised an important point about short-term versus medium to longer-term actions. When we talk about short-term responses we are arguing from a position of existing research and existing knowledge. That was the basis of our MACC curves. All those technologies have been tried and tested. The challenge now is to deploy them onto farms. They are ready to be rolled out on the farms. Many farmers have adopted them but, typically, one finds in an adoption process what has been characterised as an S curve turned sideways or a sigmoid curve. At the very early stages there tends to be very low levels of adoption. Some farmers at the frontier adopt and then they can influence others around them. It is the same situation here. Farmers have to change on a number of fronts and we are not naive enough to think it is going to happen very rapidly in the early stages, but we think it will pick up momentum.

That is why the signpost farm programme has been devised, to focus particularly on demonstrating to farmers how they can benefit in a real way from adopting the known and existing technologies. As I said earlier, we are not in any way underestimating the challenge of persuading farmers to change. For example, if one is a farmer who has been buying 18-6-12 fertiliser for years from one's co-operative or merchant, it is very hard to change overnight to a product one does not know anything about or perhaps the merchant might not have the knowledge and information. It will require what we believe to be an all-industry response to get the adoption of the type of changes that are required and to make the quick impact that the Senator and everybody else is concerned about.

The Senator is absolutely right about feed additives. Most of the existing technologies we are looking at are designed for indoor systems. Our challenge is to adapt those to grass-based systems. We are in complete agreement with the Senator on the desirability of doing that.

I will leave the question about ammonia emissions to Dr. O'Mara because that is his area of expertise.