Mr. Bill Callanan:

It is incorporated into the feed system. For example, if you have an indoor feeding system, the feed is made available, and the animal is continually taking in a certain level of feed and you can incorporate it through that system. If an animal comes in and out twice a day for milking, you can mix it through the feed ration that it gets at milking time, but it is clear that it does not create the same level of reduction as continual feed. That means we get spikes and reductions. There is an immediate reduction in methane production but that dwindles quite quickly and it does not create an evenness across the whole day.

There is no mechanism for applying that in a pastoral system where there are a lot of animals that do not even come in for milking. That is where that work is at. The question is how we develop that: whether it is by means of slow release, boluses or other such measures. Ultimately, there is a need for all the safety checks to have been done as part of the process to make sure that we can do it. That is why we are cautious in terms of it not coming on stream at the pace people might like. We will require it not in the third budgetary period but in the first and second.