Professor Linda Doyle:

I am the director of one of the centres. There are now 17 centres in Ireland. My centre is called CONNECT. It is the centre for future networks and communications. One might ask what that has to do with agriculture and why we are talking about that here. The first answer for us is that research impacts on agriculture in all sorts of ways. Some aspect of all of the centres that exist in Ireland will have relevance to agriculture. I will explain a little about how the centre that I am interested in impacts in that context.

When we look to the future and how to optimise how farms are run and how to till the land, a lot is dependent on getting data about the land and land usage, particularly live data and real-time data. We refer to that as making use of what is known as the Internet of things. Sensors are placed right throughout the land to measure, for example, soil growth or moisture, to know if gates are open or closed or where slurry is spread, and similar things.

It is increasingly the case that, as we look to the future, people are instrumenting their land and rural Ireland with sensors to gather data. Those sensors need to be designed in order that they are appropriate for the robust conditions on the farm. Those sensors also need to be connected to networks. The future network centre that we work at does all of that. We have people who design sensors that can measure the pH of the land or they can do all sorts of things relating to, for example, biomarkers in cattle. We also have people who design the networks that can be placed across the land and gather the data. More importantly, we have people who make meaning out of the data. The data are nothing until meaning is made of them. This can help, for example, predict how crops are going to grow or when might be the right time to cut grass, or help predict or understand better how what is grown can be rotated and changed. The information can be used by an individual farmer or collectively by groups of farmers to use and till the land better. This kind of technology is becoming increasingly important and that is very much part of what we research.

Most importantly, when people talk about things like precision agriculture and agriculture in the future, they often envisage very expensive options. An example is a tractor that can be connected to all sorts of very flash equipment that can help fertilise based on GPS co-ordinates exactly in a particular area. While that is important, we are also interested in researching low-cost technologies that are affordable to a wider range of farms and that is a very important thing to do. Through SFI's CONNECT centre, we get to do that.

We also get to try out these ideas at scale. One of the things that is funded, again through SFI, is one of our research infrastructures called Pervasive Nation. That has allowed us to build a network right across the country including in rural areas, where we can actually test some of these ideas. We have test centres on Teagasc farms, we have flooding measurement around cities and rural areas, and we have all sorts of other sensors that we test to try out these ideas.

We see a number of things happening. On one side, we see we can push the science and the fundamentals and look at the next generation networks. On the other side, we are also working very closely with industries to help them develop next generation products and make these things into a reality in order that Ireland can avail of them. While we are interested primarily in what we can do in Ireland, we are also interested in the agriculture-oriented companies that want to develop ideas here and sell them abroad.

That is one of the very wonderful things about these research centres. It is possible to do the very fundamental stuff and then take that and work with industry, do more applied stuff and see it go further and have greater impact from that beginning right down to really making a change in people's lives. That gives the committee a rough flavour of the kind of things that we do in CONNECT that are relevant for the agricultural centre. I stress again that in all of the research centres that the committee will look at, it will find that there are different aspects that touch on agriculture, the science of agriculture, the technology behind it and how we can impact it.