Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On organic farming, it seems to me the challenge is farmers getting a fair price for their produce. The model in the last number of years has been the low-margin, high-volume one and that is intensive farming. There is an alternative model in the organic one. It is higher-margin and low-volume. Is this not the critical point? We want farmers to produce food. We want farmers to have sustainable livelihoods. The effort should be mostly towards ensuring farmers get a fair price and if they did then they would not need to have such high stocking rates on their farms, would not need to be applying so much nitrogen on their land and then we would not have the knock-on effect of the polluted rivers.