Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief as I know there is time pressure. I thank everybody for the excellent information and presentations. There is just another point that is an undue additional pressure on farmers, which is the eight-week period particularly for dairy farmers relating to soil and water. The IFA has done extensive work on this. In December and January, it reckoned on 65 l per cow to wash down the parlour on a daily basis. Currently, it is ten to 15 days for a storage period. As a result, we are looking at something of the order of a sixfold increase in the storage time. Based on the IFA's reckoning, this has the potential to add €20,000 to €30,000 to the operational cost of a farm over the course of a year.

Everybody in the Dáil agrees that we need farmers to be involved in working on environmental challenges. We appreciate that they are probably our foremost environmentalists and we really should not be trying to do anything that puts additional pressure on them. I want to be brief because of the time but the witnesses have clearly looked at what is happening across Europe. What is the norm across Europe in terms of soil and water storage? Have we gone to the extreme with these proposals? What about our contemporaries in France, the UK and other notable dairy producers in Europe? What are their guidelines for soil water storage?