Mr. Bill Callanan:

There are 135,000 farmers. A certain number of farmers are very small. I think there is only a handful of very large farmers who may be avoiding a situation of applying for the Common Agricultural Policy. In general, the vast majority of all farmers are applicants under the Common Agricultural Policy.

As for how many farmers use nitrogen, there is quite a different spread across the farming population of those using it. Approximately half of the fertilisers used in the country are used by dairy farmers. Tillage farmers also use it. The spread then across beef is quite varied in terms of their dependence on nitrogen fertilisers. Under the organic requirements, just around 2% of the land area is organic so they are certified as not using it. We also have significant areas of what is called high nature value, HNV, land, which is identified as approximately 1 million ha and that includes the likes of a lot of commonage, Natura land, etc. That would receive either no or very little fertiliser in the main in terms of overall usage. I do not have absolute figures.

The way that we track overall operations at farm level is through the national farm survey, which is operated and implemented by Teagasc. We report the metrics associated with that survey to the European Farm Accountancy Data Network, FADN, which gives an oversight on the available storage on farms and income from different farm types. As it is structured to cover quite a wide variety, we can get the results for the Senator. The initiative has been expanded to look at issues, including biodiversity, or it is expanding in that way to get metrics on biodiversity at individual farm level as well, and how we can report and improve on that.