Mr. John Murphy:

One answer I received when I asked was that it could roughly increase costs by €80 to €100 per animal but we have other issues with it as well. With the grazing structure or the animal raising structure we have when animals are outside, the difficulty would be giving them the additive on an ongoing basis. These additives work well indoors because you can feed the animals the additive continuously in the feed. There is a lot of work to be done to see can we get an additive that will last a number of hours in the animal so that when they come back for their next feed, particularly dairy cows at milking, it will still be effective. The effectiveness of the additive decreases the longer it is in the animal's system so we need to develop a system where we can feed the animal twice a day with it and it is effective for the whole day. However, if it is an indoor system, you can feed the additive continuously because you control the feed.

The cost is a huge issue because the reality is farmers are price takers. When you impose more costs on us, it is difficult to get it from the marketplace. Everybody talks about sustainability but no one wants to pay for it, particularly at a consumer level. Therefore, we say that the Government and the State needs to support the introduction of this type of measure.