Professor Linda Doyle:

I wish to add just a few points because Professor Doohan covered most things there. One of the key points that Deputy Corcoran Kennedy made was the notion of learning through nature. Essentially, the kind of systems that we would like to complement Professor Doohan's knowledge with represent that ability to learn. If one is able to understand what is happening in one's land, at a micro-climate, micro level, there is no need to dump fertiliser equally everywhere, for example. There is no need to have the same approach to everything. One can take a really precise approach to what one does.

A lot of the research we are interested in concerns how to put the sensors throughout land, in a sufficiently low-cost way, in order to produce the data to make those decisions. Much of the motivation for those decisions is so that big amounts of fertiliser are not used in the first place. Everything is not fertilised to the same level, and one has a very targeted approach to each of the areas and sub-areas. Typically, when people use the term "precision farming", what they are talking about is tailoring everything precisely for a landscape. While the kind of radical new ideas that come from Professor Doohan's work are still needed, once something is in place, we are able to optimise it to the best usage - for the least use of fertiliser one can get away with, for example. That is where these kinds of technologies are increasingly important.

On a further point, several members asked how transferable things are and what do we do in Ireland. Ireland is a small market, as Professor Doohan said. However, one of the phrases that the Industrial Development Authority, IDA, often use here is "Ireland is small enough to test but large enough to prove", and we find that with a lot of the technology we are developing. As Ireland is small, we have great relationships with Teagasc, Science Foundation Ireland, the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment, and with county councils, so we can actually try out ideas. We get to actually deploy these sensors and networks in rural areas in a way that we would not easily do in another country. We talk a lot about testing the future in Ireland in Connect. That is something we are very proud of and that we feel is not actually pushed enough. One can actually try things out at a scale that says "this is workable". It is very easy to try something in the lab, but you really need to get it out into the horrible conditions of real life to say that it works. We are in a fantastic position in Ireland in that we can do that. We need to do much more of that, and the research infrastructure-type programmes allow us to do that.

My final point is that a lot of the Internet of things is about thinking differently and Ireland is in a position where we have to start thinking differently. As a simple example one can imagine oil in a tank in a farmyard with a little sensor inside to say whether the tank is full. On a very simplistic level, that just says whether the oil needs to be replaced. On a more sophisticated level, one could change the ownership model. Rather than one person owning their own oil, that could be a distributed storage entity - "I do not get involved with the farmers, I fill up the oil whenever the oil needs to be filled up, and there is a pay-as-you-go system". One can rethink how assets are used, accessed, owned and controlled when one starts to think in the terms of the Internet of things. This thinking can extend throughout the farming system. One can think of it in the storage of grain or in a sharing economy context.

This technology is not just about putting down some sensors and measuring something. There is a great deal of really interesting research about how to turn things on their head, about who owns, who accesses, and when they get access to something. It does require some collective thinking and thinking outside the box but I think that is to a great extent what the research centres of scale offer, namely the ability to bring the different parties together. One might have the more traditional researchers in the agricultural space coming together with people who think about the sharing economy, or about technology and networks. For me, a resource is just as much spectrum and cloud processing as it is grains, oil, or fuel. When these are thought of collectively, one starts to get very different answers, and that is what the research offers as well.