Dr. Frank O'Mara:

I thank the Senator for his comments and challenges to us. I have been to the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine a number of times and we get plenty of robust questioning there as well.

We can come back with more detail later but I would like to set our submission in a little bit more context, and I apologise that we perhaps did not do that. We have about 250 advisers with a client list of approximately 44,000, who are farmers who have a contractual arrangement with us. We deal with those 44,000 on a one-to-one basis, but we would also provide much information and advice to the generality of farmers because all our events are free to people to attend. We publish a lot of material in media and so on. We put a lot information out there.

On water quality, just to step back a minute, we see sustainability being at the core of what we do. We define sustainability as having a number of legs, none of which is more important than the other. There is economic, environmental and social sustainability. We cannot have a functioning food system that does not have the three of those working well. All our advisory programmes and the research programmes that support those are about trying to deliver that sustainability, and water quality is a key aspect of environmental sustainability. Our general advisory messages to farmers would incorporate a huge amount of advice around how to manage their farms to ensure good outcomes for water quality. The Senator mentioned nutrient management planning, derogation plans and advice to farmers around fertiliser or how to use organic manures. That is a key part of the business that we do and the information that we communicate to farmers everyday through our 250 advisers.

What I talked about in the opening statement was two specific programmes that deal just with water quality - the agricultural catchments programme, which around the research and measurement end of it, and the new agricultural sustainability support and advisory programme, ASSAP, which is specific and-----