Mr. Brendan Crosse:

I thank the Senator. In terms of grants and supports we have received from Government agencies, we received innovation vouchers for milk powder production trials in Moorepark and we received equity funding from Enterprise Ireland. Follow-on funding was challenging, however, because, as I said, much of our work to date has been on developing production systems, investing in genetics and things like that. These do not fall under Enterprise Ireland's remit. They relate to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. We have been kind of challenged by that throughout our discussions with Enterprise Ireland. In fairness, the matters in question do not come under its remit. That is all we have received to date in that regard.

In terms of importing milk to help us with production, the large dairy industry that exists in Ireland processes 1 million or sometimes 2 million litres per day. To get into those plants, we need to be delivering at least a tanker of milk to justify a couple of hours of production. Unfortunately, the smaller guys are probably handling 500,000 litres over a year. Therefore, for us to produce an ingredient product we know we can scale, we need to be efficient in manufacturing. To do that, we need to put volume together at the start and, hopefully, by the expansion and entrance of new farmers into Ireland, we can displace that imported milk quite quickly.