Ms Karin Dubsky:

We are going down a cul-de-sac of being this far and having to continue. At the Young Scientist exhibition this year, a young lad from a family with a dairy herd did a survey on happiness and contentment of farmers, as well as depression of farmers. It made very stark reading. Looking at the Bannow Bay example from last autumn, the feeling of happiness when you are doing something for an area and the feeling of pride if things are okay are really important. You do not get money for it but that also has to be taken into account. We need to value that in some way. Something else which we did not do earlier was on carbon farming. The Senator said he was cutting peat. At the moment farmers do not get anything for their salt marsh or their peat bogs in terms of carbon sequestration but that must come in, in order that it is possible for farmers to get some of their income through that.