Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be very brief; I will not hold up the meeting. I thank Mr. Keane and Ms Richardson for their answers. I am glad to hear them. This next point may have been touched on and I do not expect the witnesses to go into it again - just say it has already been dealt with and I will find out about it - but I read recently that a dairy farmer down south had about 150 acres and about 140 cows. As he said himself, he was not a mad environmentalist, but he had tried the new grass-clover mix. He found that buying the fertiliser, which is at an extraordinary price - and will be at an extraordinary price in 2022; I do not know how farmers will afford it - and the cost of hiring men to put it out was just short of €30,000 each year. Therefore, he decided to go over to the grass-clover mixes and reduced fertiliser. This had cut his costs by up to €20,000. The point he was making was that the yield from the cows was the very same. In other words, it had not dropped. Is this the way forward? I was just listening to the answers that came on screen. Is there a difficulty with those mixes in the west, north west or midlands, where a lot of the land is just is not as good? It might only work well on better grounds. As I do not know, I am asking for Mr. Keane's opinion.