Mr. Barry Caslin:

As I said earlier, confidence is key. It is needed by farmers and in the right structures. There is a price for a kilo of beef, for example, or a litre of milk at the dairy co-op. If a farmer brings grain to the co-op, he or she gets a price per tonne and there are quality parameters in all those industries. Those structures are not currently there with hemp so farmers growing it now do so in a vacuum. They do not know what the market or the options will be. There are limited artisan-type markets around hemp, with some producers producing small amounts of CBD and hemp oil. The fibre is the key area and there is no use for that fibre. In a way it is a pity. If it is grown for botanicals, seed and CBD, all the fibre is being left on the ground. It is a lot of carbon that is being allowed to biodegrade on the ground.

Ideally, we should have some kind of an industry to give confidence to the growers so they know they have a market outlet for it. That would be a market for utilising the fibre and locking it up as hempcrete or insulation material in buildings, for example, and maybe building modular homes using the likes of hempcrete.

We have the lime in the country. Lime is mixed with the shivs or hurds and water. We have all the ingredients to produce the material in the country such that we do not necessarily need to use so much concrete in buildings. What we really need is to give confidence to people so they will move into the houses built with hemp. We need engineers and architects to be confident about all this as well. We are agronomists within Teagasc, so I am not too sure about the level of understanding of using hemp and living in a hemp house within those fraternities or industries. It has been done. We are not starting from scratch here. It has been done in other countries. There are hemp houses around Europe, including Ireland. The first in Ireland was in County Longford. Many more have been built since. A lack of confidence is the key to why the markets have not evolved to the level we would like to see.