Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The committee will now hear from Professor Mark Ferguson, director general of Science Foundation Ireland and chief scientific adviser to the Government, Professor Linda Doyle, director of CONNECT, SFI's research centre for future networks and communications, and Professor Fiona Doohan, professor of crop diseases at UCD. I thank the witnesses for attending.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

I thank the Vice Chair and the committee. I will give a summary of my opening statement and there then will be time for-----

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I apologise for interrupting. I am new to the Chair and forgot to read the statement on privilege.

Before we begin, I bring to the witnesses' attention to the fact that they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the evidence they give to the committee. However, if they are directed to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter and they continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should not criticise nor make charges against any person or entity by name or in such way as to make him or her or it identifiable. Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that they should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the House or an official either by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

I call on Professor Ferguson to continue.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, is the Government funding agency for science. In order to access funding, applicants undergo a competitive process involving written applications that are internationally reviewed for excellence and impact. We fund all areas of science, typically in collaboration with companies or, in the case of agriculture, with co-ops, Teagasc or other national bodies. We are very collaborative. In terms of assessing the impact of our approach, Ireland ranks approximately tenth in the world for spending on science, up from a ranking of 46th - below that of Bangladesh - when SFI was formed in 2000, so we have made a considerable improvement. In the case of agriculture, animal and dairy, by citations we are ranked second in the world and are in good standing in several areas relevant to the committee.

We are keen on collaboration with industry and there are some interesting intersections on which my colleague, Professor Linda Doyle, will speak, in particular as regards software, sensors, the Internet and traditional agriculture. SFI supports approximately 1,600 collaborations across the country and 1,400 researchers every year.

We provide funds of about €57 million to agricultural research projects. These span a wide range including the genomics of cattle and crops, the Internet of things and other items, some of which my colleagues will speak about. The committee may have seen recently that we have announced two research centres which are related to agriculture. One of them, that was announced in the budget, is called Future Milk, which is about how the Internet of things, sensors and software can relate to the dairy industry. Another centre is on the bio-economy called Beacon, which is about how waste products can be reused into useful products. Rather than tell the committee a huge amount about the agency, it is better that I answer questions and, more appropriately, that I hand over to my colleagues who will speak more specifically about the research that is of interest to the committee. I ask Professor Linda Doyle to begin.

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.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Doyle. I call Professor Doohan.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

I am a crop scientist at UCD and I have worked for almost 20 years on crop protection, reducing the amount of yield that we lose because of plant diseases. There is a lot of collaborative research on the island, particularly between UCD and Teagasc. We work to see if we can reduce the yield losses caused by diseases. Although we are very proud in Ireland that the tillage sector rapidly takes up new technologies, and because of that we often have the highest yields in the world year-on-year, the downside is that we have very high inputs. Many of those inputs go towards paying for chemicals to control plant diseases. The situation over the past few years has got a little more alarming because the diversity of chemicals available to control diseases is reducing. This is partly because of EU legislation driven by environmental pressures and also because it is not a constant relationship. The wheat in the field this year will not be the same variety that will be seen in the field in ten years time. It changes all the time because of the dynamic relationship between, mainly, the fungi that cause disease and the wheat crop or the variety. This variety might be resistant to disease for a few years and suddenly it will get higher disease. In the same way as the human flu, plant or crop pathogens evolve.

We work a lot on sustainable crop production, so it is an integrated approach for disease control that involves cultural practices, and farmers have good cultural practices to mitigate against disease, chemical inputs such as fungicides, crop genetics, and neuro-biological control treatments. Crop breeding companies produce these new varieties that are trialled by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine here in Ireland, and are therefore recommended to farmers, and they are continually evolving the stocks that they are producing. We work with them and through the funding we have received from SFI, the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and, more recently, the EU, we have gone from very basic research such as that referred to by Professor Doyle through to very applied research where we can say to breeding companies that if they use this piece of DNA, they will have more disease resistance. The bottom line is that it shortens the breeding. If a plant breeding company decides to produce a new variety, it takes it 12 years. We can reduce that time by half with these new biotechnologies. That has been very successful to date and because of research funded by SFI and others in Ireland, we are now rolling out some of those molecular markers to the breeding companies.

Also, recently funding from SFI has put us to the forefront in collaboration with TCD in developing new biological treatments and that is really exciting. It is looking to nature for agents that can control diseases. We develop new environmentally friendly products that can be used to reduce diseases or to help plants face adverse environmental and climatic conditions. More recently, the CONSUS Project, which is an SFI project funded jointly by SFI and Origin Enterprises, is looking at the type of smart technologies that Professor Doyle described earlier. It is combining the smart technologies at the IT level with soil science and biotechnology markers to try to develop a holistic and smart approach to crop production in the future.

Due to Irish funding in crop research, we are to the forefront in Europe in helping companies develop new disease resistant crops. I am glad to say also that, because of the funding from the Government through SFI and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, we were ranked first some years ago out of 1,300 applications for an EU network for innovative and integrative education in crop disease control. These and similar doctoral products in agricultural science are invaluable if we are to train the people who will work to innovate in the tillage sector or in other crop production sectors in the future.

It is timely to discuss climate change and adverse environmental conditions. As we see all over the country, not least yesterday but also in recent and more regular events in Donegal, crops are facing much more adverse environmental conditions. This research has the potential to examine if we can deliver crop varieties that can be harvested earlier or that can be stored in different ways, or alternative crops. That is the next challenge. There is the potential to deliver what I call tailored nutritionally-enhanced non-GM food and feed through research. We have much of the infrastructure and expertise in place to deliver on this potential. Professor Doyle has alluded to IT, and in UCD we are very fortunate to have specialised facilities that are unique globally where we can mimic any potential future climate and test how crop varieties perform under these future climates. We can test if pathogens will evolve, or if diseases will evolve to be much worse in Ireland under what is predicted for Cork, Kerry, Donegal or wherever under future environmental conditions.

There is great potential based on the resources and expertise that we have and, very importantly, the links with industry. Unfortunately, with the exception of potato breeding, there is limited indigenous crop breeding in Ireland. Accordingly, we work with our EU partner companies, particularly in the UK and France, and there is great scope to develop more formal research collaborations with people in those areas to really accelerate the development of new crops, alternative crops, and new varieties of existing crops, such as barley or wheat that are more adapted to the climatic conditions we are facing.

There is also great scope to integrate science and policy in order to promote pan-science research so that we can develop new products that are really enhanced. Some of the buzz words at the moment are "nutritional biomedicine" regarding crop products that are nutritionally enhanced, for example, ideas that there may be particular varieties that could be used to alleviate diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, etc. These are all possibilities that can be looked at and developed through research. There is amazing infrastructure in Ireland because of the funding of research to date. We are reaping the rewards and gaining the benefits from that at the moment, but there is a lot still to be done. There is great potential.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I call Deputy McConalogue.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their informative presentations. In terms of the research that SFI commissions and how that operates, I am interested in how successful ownership operates in particular. In relation to the type of agricultural projects that would be funded, and we are talking about tillage today in particular, how does this compare with research that is happening in other countries and how much of that crosses over? How different is research in other countries because of the specific climate we have in Ireland and our own conditions? How much of what the witnesses do can be used internationally and how much of what is used internationally is relevant and valid here?

Professor Doohan referred to various varieties and nutritional biomedicine. In terms of cross over and the thresholds in relation to what people would regard as genetically modified, will Professor Doohan elaborate further on how she views that and how it is viewed generally? Going forward, the big question and the big challenge for our tillage sector is profitability and the fact that people are leaving the industry because the margins are not there. In regard to the role that science and innovation can play, I am interested in the witnesses' view on where that can take us and what is possible. What SFI can contribute to that?

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We will take two or three questions and then we will come back to the witnesses. I call Deputy Kenny.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I wish to raise a couple of small issues.

I am interested in the idea of the biological treatment of crops. It is striking and something on which I seek the witnesses' comments. Recently I was informed that Ireland has one of the largest uses of fertilisers per hectare for agricultural product in the world. It is something that probably will be unsustainable in the long term and yet farmers are in a competitive world market. How will we deal with that? What solutions could come from that? In that context, I refer to the whole area of energy from land, biodigesters, using the gases that are produced from the bovine sectors and the possibility of them being harnessed in some way. How much research is going into that? It is an area in which Ireland seems to be falling way behind and not keeping up.

Another issue is diseases in crops. I read something interesting recently to the effect that some countries in Latin America had a problem in getting fertilisers and a lot of the pesticides that are commonly used in other places. What they did was to go back to nature by planting other crops around the edges of their fields of oats or barley. This brought in predators, which took care of the issues with which the cash crop had to deal. Is there something there? A hundred years ago, before we had all of this science and so on, farmers had learned, over generations and thousands of years, through nature what resolved these issues. The advent of chemicals has meant that in a lot of cases we have forgotten, collectively, how that can work. Is there much research going into that area now? It is certainly my view and the view of most people that the chemical answers will not always be there for us. A lot of these diseases are becoming resistant to them. Is there a means of going back and finding a scientific way of applying the old system to resolve these issues? If there is, how does it compare? Are we talking about going back to much lower yields or about going back to different breeds and different ways of doing things that would be more labour intensive and possibly less competitive? I seek the witnesses' views in regard to that.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We will take one more set of questions and then we will go back to the witnesses. I call Deputy Corcoran Kennedy.

Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I have questions for Professor Doohan on a number of issues. I refer to the depletion of soil and nutrients, not only here but globally. Can she indicate how that will be handled? If our population globally is increasing as we try to cope with the impact of climate change and if we are losing our soil at the rate we appear to be, how can we counteract that? Has Professor Doohan done research in that area?

The other question is on diversification. What is happening in respect of high-protein plants that can be for both human and animal use? The witness also mentioned limited crop breeding in Ireland. What does she mean by that? What are we focusing on here and what could we potentially focus on here that we are not focusing on at the moment? I also had the question that Deputy McConalogue asked as to when does enhancing crops through selective breeding become genetic modification, GM, or not GM. There is quite a movement against GM and it would great if the witness clarified the difference between the two.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Corcoran Kennedy. A mobile telephone is still on. I remind people to switch them off. We will go back to the panel now for answers to those questions please.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

Very good. I will start with the easy questions and then I will pass over to my colleagues to answer the more difficult ones. On the intellectual property, IP, protocol, Ireland has such a protocol. It is agreed across Government about how intellectual property is dealt with. In general it is the following: Science Foundation Ireland is Government funded and therefore if we are funding it, the intellectual property belongs to the State. We give that intellectual property to the university or public institution that we are funding. Science Foundation Ireland makes no claim itself on the intellectual property, but if we were funding something at UCD or Trinity or UCC, we give that intellectual property to the university and we require the university to exploit it based on the national protocol.

In the case of collaborative research projects, it is very simple; the more one pays, the more one owns. If there is a joint funder with industry - let us say they are paying for 10% of it - then the State owns it, and they may have some right of first refusal to license it. On the other hand, if they are paying for 90% of it and we are paying for 10% of it, then they own it, and we have some rights to use it for research, or for more wide-spread uses. It is a very logical protocol. It is a piece of Government legislation, and it effectively uses the principles that I have just outlined. However, Science Foundation Ireland makes no claim on any intellectual property. We do not get in the way of the exploitation; we give it to the university, and we mandate that the university, institute of technology or whatever public body, must exploit it.

A member asked about energy from the land, waste products, and so on. I mention two things. The Centre for Marine and Renewable Energy Ireland, which Science Foundation Ireland, SFI, funds and is based at University College Cork, has within it a biogas project. This is about taking plant material - I was going to say crops, but it could be things from forestry, waste material or whatever - and seeing if biogas could be used as an augmentation to other renewable energies. Wind, for example, may be intermittent, but one may be able to fill in some of the gaps in renewable energies in this way. That is one area, and I would be very happy to pass the details on to the committee.

I also mention one of our recently-funded research centres, which is called Beacon. That is based at UCD, and is about the circular economy, or the bioeconomy. This is not so much about energy; it uses waste products from milk, which one has to pay to dispose of. Through a process of going through filters and changing the nature of that material, one can actually turn it into the building blocks for some of the plastic industry, for example. One thus has three benefits; waste is cut down; the farmer or processor does not have to pay for the disposal of that waste; and some money is made from turning a waste product into something for the circular economy. Many circular economy research centres around the world do that for energy; the unique thing about the one in Ireland is that it is not focused on energy, but on making the building blocks for commonly used materials, which is probably a more viable business than trying to build on the energy space and biogas. Again, I can make introductions there. I will now hand over to some of my colleagues. Professor Doohan may like to answer some of the other questions.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

As an example of how the intellectual property would be handled from a project viewpoint, a joint TCD-led UCD collaborative project was looking at the development of new biological control agents. On the basis of that, we patented and developed some technology, and now we have moved from SFI funding to Enterprise Ireland funding to set up a company to develop those new biologicals and indigenous industries. It is joint UCD-TCD intellectual property behind that.

I will now answer some of Deputy McConalogue's questions. On the crossover with other countries, there is quite a lot. We make a very big effort to integrate into other EU projects, particularly in areas which we deem to be very similar to Ireland geographically and climatically, particularly French and UK research, especially western UK research, where the problems faced are similar to those in Ireland.

The profitability of tillage crops is obviously a big problem. One of the downsides, and one of the areas where there is great potential to make inroads, is that we have not necessarily reaped the rewards of all of this technology yet. For example, if a farmer grows two varieties, one disease-resistant and one susceptible, they get the same spray regime. They are not benefiting from the fact that this is very resistant to disease, whereas in animal science that is a very refined economic breeding index model. There is a lot we can do to refine the way we rank and grade different varieties of cereals for farmers. The economics of two varieties should not be the same if they are genetically very different in terms of their disease resistance.

To come to genetic modification; biotechnology includes genetic modification, but it also includes molecular marker technology, which is the technology I talked about. Molecular marker technology is where there is a test for a piece of DNA that is naturally present in wheat. One variety of wheat might be resistant to disease, another might be susceptible. One may have very poor yield, another may have high yield.

If one can figure out what genes control those traits, one can have DNA, biotechnological, tests for those genes, and then all the new plants that are being produced can be tested much more quickly using that technology. That is distinct from genetic modification, GM. It is an economic question, a marketing question at a national level - should Ireland be GM free, as it now? I think in many cases that makes sense; whether one agrees with GM is a different issue. For me it is a grey area. It is like asking if everyone is good at driving a car; I do not think they all are. The answer to the questiion varies, depending on the actual GM line, as it is called. For me, that is very variable.

In terms of biological treatments, I really like and welcome the comments from Deputy Corcoran Kennedy. Yes, we can learn a lot from nature. In fact, in developing the new biological agents that, led by Trinity, we developed, we went to nature and we asked: "Why are there wild relatives of cereals that grow very happily on the side of the field - even though it's very dry, or very wet, or there are very high disease levels - standing up happy as Larry while the other crops, if they had not had all the inputs, would fall down?" We realised that in those crops, there is a lot of nature that has been bred out because of intensive agriculture. We can go back to nature to learn a lot and there is a lot more that we can learn there.

Regarding crop margins and alternative crop borders surrounding the crops, much research has been done on that at EU level and it shows that it can be profitable. It is not there yet but there are a lot of improvements and it can be done. One could even ask whether a farmer growing tillage for animal feed should really be growing one variety. They should be growing a mixture of varieties; one variety is resistant to this disease, one to that, so there is balancing to be done. It is a trade-off.

A question was asked about how we can counteract the depletion of soil nutrients. That can only be achieved by taking a sustainable approach, so that we are looking at reinvesting in the soil. In fact, soil is probably one of the most undervalued national resources, and there is a lot more that can be done. There is very good research done in Ireland, but there is a lot more that can be done in order to analyse the microbiome, the invertebrates, and all the different biota and minerals that exist in soil. That is a complex thing. We are certainly going to run out of fertilisers if the world continues as it is, and we need a more sustainable alternative.

Regarding high-protein plants, research is ongoing in different institutions in Ireland on high-protein plants. I would say that it is in its infancy, but there are some promising results. However, I think a lot more has to be done and we may need to think outside the box. For example, if sugarbeet was brought back, one could say "I am not feeding sugarbeet directly to animals, but I am using it to produce fungal protein and I am feeding that to animals", because it is very easy to cultivate fungi on sugarbeet. There are lots of innovative solutions that can be investigated to see if they are feasible.

On the question on limited crop breeding, we work with industry, which breeds varieties not solely for Ireland as the market is not big enough. Potato breeding in Teagasc, which also does a lot of collaborative research with industry into grass-breeding, is the exception There are no dedicated cereal-breeding industries in Ireland because of the scale of cereal production here. That is not going to change in the short term. The smartest solution is that we work with the big industries, which have big banks of what is called germplasm in lots of different varieties, and we ensure that they tailor varieties that are suited to Ireland. However, there are so many different micro-climates in Ireland that there is not a single solution for even three farmers. Three adjacent farms might have very different micro-climates, and that is where the smart technologies will come in to tell us how we can be much more selective, even at a very regional level.

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.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Professor Doyle, and call on Deputy Willie Penrose.

Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. Could they outline in detail the impact that will arise from the establishment of the future milk centre and how it will work with the major partners and stakeholders in the dairy industry? Over what time period is it likely to be in being and what do they see emerging? I am ad idemwith Professor Doyle. I appreciate the appropriateness of extracting natural data from the land by way of sensors and instrumentation, how that can be applied and the works that derive therefrom. However, it is all about the larger farm or the more intensive production. For the vast majority of people along the west coast and parts of the Midlands, this will not have any application. Holdings will be too small.

It is consonant with the drift that is taking place towards mechanisation or the aggregation of agricultural holdings. This will fit in.

Professor Doohan works in UCD. Does she operate in conjunction with Lyons Research Farm, the Teagasc Oak Park Research Centre or similar entities? I know Professor Jimmy Burke and his colleagues at Oak Park carried out a great deal of research in their areas.

One of the things about disease-resistant crops is that no matter how fast one goes, various mutations of stem cells always come along and create difficulties in the context of the application of particular products, be they herbicides, pesticides, fungicides or whatever. There is a race on in that regard. What my colleagues were asking is: is it necessary to develop crops that are almost GM-like in order to deal with such eventualities? In that context, has Professor Doohan ever been asked her opinion on application of glyphosate or the widespread use of that particular chemical under the trade name Roundup? A decision will be made at EU level very shortly on whether the licence relating to this chemical will be extended for a further period. One of the problems we had was the World Health Organization saying X and somebody else saying Y. Surely that was an area in respect of which Professor Doohan or someone of her excellence and background should have become involved. The decision that is made could have far-reaching consequences, particularly as the chemical in question is now so widely applied in Ireland. Last Saturday morning, while listening to Damien O'Reilly's radio show, I heard an intense and worthwhile debate between a person from Kilkenny and somebody from Meath in respect of the application of it.

On biological treatments and environmentally-friendly products and dealing with the adverse environmental conditions that Professor Doohan mentioned in the context of Donegal, is she referring to developing a potato that could mature at an earlier date than the traditional potato? Roosters or Kerr's Pinks are one thing, but is it possible to develop something that might come out of the ground earlier? Senator Mac Lochlainn has just referred to the huge losses potato farmers in Donegal suffered as a result of the flooding that occurred there recently.

We have limited indigenous crop-breeding programmes. I salute Professor Doohan in trying to widen activity in that sphere. She is working with her European partners to try to achieve something in this regard. I know she receives funding for the CONSUS project from SFI and Origin Enterprises. Does Professor Doohan have a paper to which we could point and say "This has been developed here to suit Irish conditions. We developed it in conjunction with our European counterparts and this is the result that is going to emerge"? Is she in a position to highlight something that can adapt to Irish conditions, that is a disease-resistant, early-producing variety and that will contribute to significant increases in agricultural output for, say, the maltingindustry or some other industry? Whatever it is, I would like to hear about it.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I call Senator Mulherin. We will then hear from Deputy Fitzmaurice.

Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

A lot of issues that are of interest have been covered. I wish to address the issue of genetically modified foods. Obviously, such foods are available for purchase by consumers in developed countries. If I understood her correctly, Professor Doohan mentioned a grey area in the context of whether these foods are safe. What is her view? I understand that such foods are genetically modified so that they are resistant to pathogens, herbicides, and diseases and that farmers can be more assured as regards their crops.

Does that mean that genetically modified crops could be grown organically? That might sound like a contradiction but there would have to be less chemical interventions in farming the crop. A purple tomato that is said to be high in antioxidants and that will help people because it has anti-cancer properties and so on is about to be commercialised in Canada. Is that unsafe? There is a narrative that scientists are more convinced than consumers that GM food is safe but Professor Doohan said that it is a grey area so I would be interested to understand further issues regarding genetically modified crops and whether they are the future. There have been debates at the committee in regard to organic products and members know that from a commercial point of view there are people who will seek out such products, in particular those of a particular socio-economic background who will pay more for organic products, but could they be buying organic genetically modified foods? People get scared about the level of interference involved in genetically modified food but it is being produced in countries where consumer protection is and is not in place and those GM products seem to give a competitive edge to producers there. In view of climate change and because of environmental challenges, it being difficult to rely on food and crops in the way we could previously, are GM products the way forward?

Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. Professor Doohan spoke on energy crops and so on that are successful in other countries. A lot of maize is imported into Ireland. The witnesses are considering crops that may be able to be grown in Ireland to replace that dependence. How far advanced is that work? It would be great if we could reduce the imports of products such as maize.

When I was growing up, we used to put bluestone and carbolic soap or a similar product on potatoes as an ordinary way of preventing potato blight. It was used for cattle and in many different areas of farming. The witnesses discussed going back to using such products. Are products available that will maximise crop production? The cost of inputs is very important, especially if one is growing corn or a similar crop because the cost of spraying on several occasions is a big expense. Are there any products coming onto the market that would solve that? The witnesses' discussion of different types of product is of interest. What is their opinion of Roundup, a product that has been hotly debated in recent times? In my opinion and that of many farmers, if a farmer does not spray with Roundup he or she will have trouble with weeds. Is there a way to ensure the same productivity in terms of tonnage of a crop such as straw while also reducing the input cost? If there is not, how far from such a situation are we?

Do the witnesses have any input into genomic testing in cattle? They indicate that they do. There is a feeling among the many people to whom I have talked about this issue that the beef sector in particular has gone down a road in terms of genomics such that animals are not pulling down the scales when they come from the dairy sector and there is a need to focus back onto cattle breeds that are being thrown to one side such as Charolais and, to a lesser extent, Limousin. When animals are killed they are not pulling down the scales and farmers are losing out even though they are supposed to be doing better because of genomic testing.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

I will address the future of milk research centre and beef genomics and allow Professor Doohan to gather her thoughts and answer the other questions. I may return to scientific advice.

Funding for the future milk research centre was announced in last week's budget. The programme is just beginning and has been reviewed internationally. It is of excellence and scale and will start in earnest next year. It is funded for at least six years. It is all about understanding the kind of technologies that Professor Linda Doyle spoke about earlier such as the intersection of software, the Internet of things, sensors and so on with the dairy industry. For example, if one wants a milk product with a certain amount of protein and fat to get the optimal price for it in the sports industry, then one traces it back to what kind of grass one needs to grow, what kind of fertiliser one needs to put in precisely, what kind of animals one will need in terms of genomics, what does their microbiome look like, how one will process the milk and so on. It is a completely integrated package of understanding with the application of sensors, the Internet of things, software and big data analytics.

The most important issue, however, is that it has to make business sense. This would be great as a research project but, at the end of the day, somebody has to make money from the investment put into it. One way this can be done is how one thinks about how one creates a high-value product in a more efficient way starting with the issues about which I have just spoken.

There is a good beef genomic database for cattle in Ireland. That is the subject of many of the breeding programmes in place. That needs to be integrated with other programmes, however. Genomics is important in terms of itself, such as the anatomy of the animal but it is all important in terms of its interaction with grass, yield and so forth. There are many issues which can be addressed in that respect and the future milk research centre will do that.

Most scientific advice is required when the situation is not clear. In the case of Roundup, there are what look like potentially opposing views on essentially the same sets of data. That is the norm at a particular stage in science. It is also the norm that when a product is so widely used and there have been so many studies on it, one has more information than on many other products. The European scientific advice mechanism, SAM, has issued a report on glyphosate, Roundup, which looked at the conflicting evidence and attempted to resolve what should be done. The report basically concluded it is generally safe and should be licensed.

One should think about all scientific matters as always bubbling up where there is disagreement. That is how science works. Then there is some kind of consensus view on what is a reasonable approach. One will always find somebody who says something different in every piece of science. That is how it works. While one will not find anybody who thinks the world is square, one will find some contrary view in most matters. What one always looks for is the consistency and coherence of the evidence. That is generally how these matters are resolved. If one wants to take a particular position, one will always be able to cherry-pick some piece of information that supports it.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

There are conflicting views on glyphosate and Roundup. What is undoubtedly clear is that we cannot do without it at farm level at present. I agree there is some weak research on both sides, as well as some strong research. It needs to be resolved at research level. However, currently there is no alternative. That comes back to the earlier question of the evolution of diseases. As we are trying to develop these new treatments, the disease is always changing to overcome them. That is why we do not, either personally or as a group in UCD, work on developing new chemicals.

That is not to say we do not need them. We absolutely do and it would be unrealistic to say we do not. Teagasc has a good reputation in trialling new chemicals and seeing how they are suited and adapted for Ireland.

What we work on is developing disease resistance. How can one variety be resistant to disease and the other susceptible? No farmer would grow the latter because it would have a terrible yield. All farmers would opt for the former because it would have a high yield. It is about trying to get the two things into one. Equally, it is true the pathogen will change to attack this. If there are two lines of defence, there is the initial line of defence, which is specific and a one-to-one interaction between a disease and a plant, and then hundreds of other subsequent actions occur, like when one's immune system is activated. We do not target the one which can be changed quite quickly, meaning the disease can reoccur. Instead, we target everything underneath. It is a much more multifaceted approach, not a single-target approach, when developing new resistant varieties of plants.

In terms of biological treatment, are we developing crops which can be harvested earlier? No, we are trying to mitigate against the augmented use of fertiliser. That is not to say there are crops which could be earlier harvesting crops such as rye, which has particular benefits for some animals. There is a balance in terms of its positive and negative effects. We can look at crops and alternative crops. We have tested some biological agents as an alternative to seed treatment. In such cases, seeds are treated with chemicals before a farmer puts them in the ground with high and low fertiliser inputs. It has been shown, particularly in the cases of low fertiliser inputs, some of these biological agents can really increase crop yield. They have a particular role to play, particularly if one is going back to a system where one might be reducing the fertiliser inputs. We have published several papers on this and have done trials in Cork.

I am based in UCD and lead the environmental centre there where we have many glasshouses and specialised climate changers for the present and the future. We also work with a team of crop scientists at Lyons Research Farm. We recently invested much in developing a long-term grass study. In the future, we hope to develop similar projects for cereals. We also work a lot with Oak Park in Carlow, which has excellent field facilities and does excellent research at field level. It is collaborative and essentially a national project. We have published much on biologicals which the committee can look at.

Through Science Foundation Ireland funding, we have worked with cereal breeders and identified lines of wheat which are totally resistant to septoria tritici blotch, STB, which is the most limiting disease in wheat in Ireland. The breeders are taking this material from us and are breeding it into new varieties for the future.

On my point that GM, genetically modified, food is a grey area, in my opinion, not all GM food is good and not all GM is bad. It has an important role to play in food security. I personally do not believe we should be advocating the development of herbicide-resistant crops where one develops a crop which can be sprayed with a herbicide and then the crop itself is resistant to it. While we need Roundup at present, one needs to advocate for and take actions to improve the long-term sustainability of soil health. That is what I mean by grey. It is not about whether it is safe. Environmentally, for me, for the long-term future it is questionable and negative. For example, it was good to put an extra gene into rice to produce Golden Rice which saved the eyesight of many children in Asia. If one puts a gene that helps control disease into wheat which, accordingly, reduces chemical inputs, that is also a good development.

I separate that from an economic decision for Ireland in the short term as to whether to go with GM. It is not something under which one should draw the line and make concrete-----.

Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

We need to take it case by case.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

Yes, and it should be considered in the long term. At the moment, what is the economic advantage of being GM free? The situation now may not be the situation in future. It does not mean we should turn off those technologies and not invest in them or in collaborative international research in that area. It may be the thing of the future. It may be that the competitive advantage of producing non-GM disappears and we do not want to be at a disadvantage long term in deploying the technology. It is an economic decision. It is not my expertise. It is certainly something to be debated. I am an organic gardener. I have an organic garden in Donegal and the two are very compatible. That is a personal opinion.

In terms of energy crops, how far advanced are we? Up to several years ago, there was a lot of research done nationally in energy crops and then there was a stall in that research. There has been a great uptake in it in more recent years again. The outlet for the energy crops will greatly dictate how much investment is made in them.

Professor Linda Doyle:

I want to address Deputy Penrose's comment about the benefit to large farms. It is true that when we come up with new technological ideas, we always start with the bigger farms that can afford to deploy them. It is the same in society in general. We have a particular edge in Ireland because we are able to push the research towards low cost. We demonstrated one of our low-cost networks at the ploughing championships last year and the year before to show people what it looks like. People were able to take the technology in their own hands, touch it and see what it would look like when deployed on their own farms. That is a really good direction to be going in.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Are there any further questions?

Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I want a clarification on the molecular marker technology that the witness referred to. Is it the same as genetically modified?

Professor Fiona Doohan:

It is not the same as genetically modified.

Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

What is the difference?

Professor Fiona Doohan:

I will take the example of breast cancer. BRCA genes for breast cancer were discovered and there is a molecular marker test for those genes which tells whether a person has enhanced susceptibility to breast cancer. It is a molecular marker test. It is the same. I might find that variety one has disease resistance because of a particular gene and I have a molecular marker test to detect that gene. It is not GM; it is testing for the presence of that gene. It is a simple way of saying if a particular non-GM gene is naturally present, the crop is more likely to be resistant to disease or will be more resistant to disease than for a variety for which there is a negative result. It is analogous to breast cancer. If somebody is positive for the gene, that person is more likely to get breast cancer than somebody who is negative. The converse situation is a crop variety that has a particular gene is more likely to be disease resistant than one that does not have it. The two are completely distinct. It is biotechnology which is much bigger than GM technology. People forget that but it is very distinct and is absolutely not GM technology.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Deputies McConalogue and Fitzmaurice want to ask a question.

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Professor Doohan mentioned there is an economic argument for maintaining non-GM status. Does she believe there is an economic benefit to being non-GM? GM crops have benefits with regard to higher crop yield. Many of our green imports are from GM sources. Will Professor Doohan flesh out her view on that a bit more?

Professor Fiona Doohan:

At the moment there is not enough evidence in Ireland to say that under our climatic conditions and at farm level that it is economically beneficial. That is an economic study outside my area of expertise. There is huge evidence in the US that at farm level it is economic and beneficial. The other question is whether we have the GM traits that are needed for Irish farming. One benefit is that disease faced in America or South America could be very different from the disease faced in Ireland. Do we have the right technologies to deliver GM crops that are more productive under Irish conditions? That is a whole case study that needs to be conducted.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

If the committee is looking at that issue, it might be interested to know what New Zealand, which has remarkable similarities to Ireland in terms of climate and the status of GM, has done. There is an extremely interesting New Zealand study that modelled the expected climate change in New Zealand at individual farm level. With farmers, it thought about how to manage it and what crops and varieties of grass to plant. A consequence of that was that a discussion about GM varieties which would perhaps be more tolerant to drought or wet or whatever the changed condition is could for the first time be part of the mix. New Zealand probably has an image of being non-GM and very natural but it is on the agenda because in order to adapt to potentially quite quick changes over 50 or 100 years, there may be a need to do that. It is an interesting approach to taking climate change data and making it real for people on an individual rather than a country-wide level and then thinking about strategies that may be deployed to mitigate against it. It may be a change in what is done but it may also be a change in the nature of what is sown. That might change the attitude to what is done.

There are a lot of fears about genetically manipulated crops but there is actually no evidence they are not safe. Safety is not the issue. The issue is much more to do with public acceptance and the interference with nature and not safety. The precautionary principle is very important. The way all regulators work is that in the absence of doubt, we should always veer towards being precautionary. That is the so-called precautionary principle. Interestingly, at EU level, that has now been balanced by the innovation principle. We should not only be precautionary because we could be so precautionary that we never make any progress at all. We can never prove anything is totally safe when we want to change it. In these discussions, the precautionary principle needs to be balanced against the innovation principle. We must consider how much innovation is being shut down and what potential is being shut down because we decided to take a conservative approach. That is the new way for regulators to approach new technologies, of which GM is just one. There are lots of others. We need to have an eye for precaution but also for innovation. We do not want to be so conservative that we have no innovation.

Professor Linda Doyle:

One of the great things about the collaborative nature of the research landscape in Ireland is that I learn lots of things from listening to Professor Fiona Doohan. I speak for both of us when I say we are really keen that if anyone ever wants to come and talk to us that they do so. We are a neutral voice because we are researchers and are not representing any companies. We are really keen that if anyone wants to come to talk to us at any time to go through the nitty-gritty of any of these things, they do so. Perhaps committee members will not all be dying to know way more about networks and spectrum but the door is very much open. We feel that very strongly. We get great funding from the State and would be happy to discuss these things. The committee may not have time as it has a huge agenda but we would be delighted for any of the people who work with it to come in and go through the basics one-on-one. We could go through what all the terms mean, what they need to know about or not know about and where the vocabulary is that is needed to be able to deal with this technical topic.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

I totally agree with that. I will give a concrete example of where GM would have to be very seriously considered. If it was discovered that by modifying a wheat gene, we could absolutely wipe out septoria tritici blotch of wheat, which is our major disease, then we would have to seriously look at it as a really viable technology because it would reduce the input cost for farmers a lot. If we go back 100 years, cereals were very tall. Through natural breeding, the green revolution reduced their height. That means a lot less energy is going into the stem versus the grain, which is up in the stem. That was a big change in agriculture. At the same time, there was the advent of chemical inputs. Together it was called the green revolution. If we suddenly discovered by modifying a wheat we could reduce the stem and increase the yield, therefore being able to harvest earlier in the year, we would have to look at that. If in areas where there is heavy rainfall in August and September, the wheat could be harvested at the same time as rye and farmers would not have the problems with harvesting that they face now, we would have to seriously look at the economics of that sort of technology.

That would be to give concrete examples.

Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

With regard to grass in different parts of the country, there is grass seed that one can adapt to different types of land and it is fairly successful. We do not seem to have attained success in the tillage sector to the same extent as in the grass sector. Why is that and are we moving to resolve that? I agree with Professor Ferguson about the great progress made in the genomic aspect of the dairy sector but there is a problem to the effect that we do not have the data in the beef sector, which seems to be blowing up in our faces. For people to be able to make judgments we need data and we do not have the data going back that would change the process in the efficient way that it changed the dairy sector.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I am interested in the discussion about the genetically modified, GM, crops. I could be totally wrong but my understanding is that GM is something that would not happen in nature. It would not happen without the interference of man, whereas with breeding, the green revolution and all the other ways of doing it - be it within the same breed or the same family - things are brought together faster than nature would do it but it is still a natural process, in that it is still within the confines of the possibility of it happening in nature. It is different whereas GM would not happen in nature. I remember an example that I was once given about a breed of strawberries. To make them frost resistant something was taken from a type of fish that lived in Arctic waters. That could never happen in nature but genetic modification could make it happen. This is what people perceive and the fear they have of it is that the process is unnatural and therefore there are dangers associated with it. A typical example was that we all thought it was safe to feed meat and bonemeal to cattle. Certainly, it was deemed safe for many years but it is not safe today because we know the consequences of it. It was not natural for bovines to eat meat and bonemeal. It would never happen in nature. This is the context in which people have the issue with GM crops.

I also seek the witnesses' view on another concern that is often raised. Many people are concerned that genetic modification creates an intellectual property, which may be owned by particular companies or brands. It then becomes something over which farmers no longer have control with regard to the seed or the input. This control may lie in the hands of whoever owns the intellectual property. This is usually a corporation that has invested in the technology for the development of the product. People are fearful that the farming community or the ordinary people of the world would lose control over the raw materials with which they produce their crops to corporations who would charge for it, limit it or take it away. Perhaps the witnesses could give their views on this.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

I will first address the issue about grass versus cereals. It is very different in that we have grass adapted to different regions versus cereals. It is a very different crop as it is perennial and in the ground all year long. The difference stems from the fact that there has been very poor investment in research into cereals. I have been in University College Dublin, UCD, for nearly 20 years and when I came to UCD, Irish agriculture as a whole had very poor investment in cereal research for a time. We suffer because of that. That situation has been rectified to a great extent in different universities around the country. Teagasc has also invested a lot in cereals research in recent years. To be honest, it really is the poor sister of the animal industry. I believe a lot more could be done both in the institutions I have just mentioned and in the work of the regional institutes of technology to deliver varieties of cereal that are adapted to particular regions. There is a lot of improvement that could be done in that respect. What are we doing to address this issue? The best we can do at the moment is to work with companies that produce varieties for similar climatic regions but that is on a gross scale. That would be much more refined by working through projects such as the crop optimisation through sensing, understanding and visualisation, CONSUS, project or CONNECT programmes in centres where we are looking at smart deployment and the regionalised weather of different farms.

That would be best. As to whether we should invest in a national cereal breeding programme, I believe we should certainly be trying to attract an international company that is willing, and which sees an economic benefit, to invest in crops adapted to Ireland, and which wants to have a base in Ireland. In developing and having all the genetic resources this comes back to the question of ownership and GM. The same thing happens with ownership of plant breeders' rights and varieties. The varieties owned by one company are quite distinct from the varieties owned by another company. If we are smart about it we would look at what companies are producing varieties that have been adapted for climates similar to Ireland's. Behind the varieties one sees on sale the companies have a huge resource and data bank of material they use to produce those varieties. This is certainly something that we should be looking at as a nation.

Deputy Martin Kenny spoke about GM, nature and the faster process. The meat and bonemeal scenario is a complex substrate. We do not know very much about it. One can take a gene which we do not know very much about and put it in to another organism. We therefore would have a system we do not understand. Alternatively, we can take a gene that has been researched extensively and put it in to a crop - for example an extra wheat gene into wheat - and we know a lot about it, it is a very well researched gene and much safer, in fact, than some of the other stuff. We must bear in mind that modified crops can now be produced non-genetically with mutagenic agents. This is where seeds are treated with chemicals that cause changes in all sorts of genes. This is a non-GM process and it is used to generate new varieties. When one considers that process versus a process we can trace, where we know exactly what is done and the nature of the gene involved then it is a very different scenario. It is very different to the meat and bonemeal scenario. Scientists, however, have not been good at communicating GM to the public. We could do a lot better in explaining and defending our views. There are great opportunities and potential to do that.

Professor Linda Doyle:

I would like to add something that might seem a bit abstract. Reference was made to ownership of GM varieties and other varieties. We are going to see this happening again in the digital world regarding the ownership of farmers' data. The data will be as valuable to people as are the other materials but they cannot see the digital material at the moment and it is really abstract for them. We need to have these conversations all of the time about who owns what. When a person practices some precision agriculture by fertilising a field according to GPS co-ordinates, in many instances it is the company that owns the tractor that ends up owning those data, not the farmer. These are powerful data that can be used in other ways. We need to have the conversation in the physical world and the digital world around this notion of being in charge of our own destiny and about having control. This is why it is a really important question to bring up time and again. It is a timely question to get people to start thinking about this stuff. I spend all of my time in my world talking about things that people cannot see such as wireless communication systems. It is a very important issue and I would love the committee to continue to ask those kinds of questions, especially now with the digital aspect added in. It would be very important for Irish farmers in the future.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

I wish to make one comment in respect of GM. As Professor Doohan has said, sometimes genetic manipulation is just about doing things that are natural but doing them faster and more precisely. It is important for people to understand that faster and more precisely is usually good. There are completely analogous situations in human medicine. For example, consider a committee talking about whether it was legitimate or should be legal to modify a fertilised human embryo to change the characteristics of the baby. One might imagine that some people would say this absolutely should not be done for characteristics such as height, eye colour or hair colour - if he or she had any hair - of the child. It would be a very different conversation in the case of parents who had a dominant mutation, which means it is always passed on, and which compromises the child. Examples would be some forms of muscular dystrophy or blindness. No matter what they do, if those parents want to have children, the child will always have that disability.

The only way we can prevent the child from having that disability, if the parents want to have their own children as opposed to adopting or some other option, is to change the gene such that the child is not disabled. It is a very different conversation with those individuals than it would be if we were talking about a change in the colour of a person's hair or his or her height. It is the same with respect to genetically modified, GM, crops. It is a more subtle debate about what we want to do. Professor Fiona Doohan made that point very clearly when she spoke about people doing something that they understand quite a good deal about and much more precisely. It is different from people doing something they do not understand but equally, perhaps it is even better than simply taking a blast approach where one changes everything and says it is "natural". I always tell people that cyanide is natural but it kills one. Therefore, natural does not necessarily mean that it is good. It is a probably a much more subtle debate. One of the great lessons - Professor Linda's Doyle's point was important in this context - is that we have lost the GM debate because it has all got into loaded situations where people take polarised views for whatever reason. It is important we have these discussions early on in order that we do not end up in that space and that people understand what is involved.

Similarly with data ownership and medicine, how much data does one own, or a Government own, or a company own? They are all good. We need a certain amount of collective data for public health but one needs individual data for oneself. One needs collective data for understanding how to manage the land in a particular area of Ireland and one also wants one's individual data to be able to best manage one's farm. Those two elements are not a case of either-or. One can have both but one needs to understand how it will go. That is an important issue for the future.

In terms of data ownership, the world is changing. Ten years or even five years ago, most data one needed to know to manage agriculture would have been collected by an organisation such as Teagasc and would have been owned and accessible by the Government. Now, most data we need to manage matters in the public sphere are owned by companies. Amazon knows much more about international trade than any Government does. The smart deployment of these technologies will mean that people know more. That is okay, there is nothing wrong with that; we just need to have a different regulatory system and a different approach to understanding what one can get for free, what one can get for oneself and what is legitimate for people to make money from. It is a different approach.

Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I have a brief question following on from what Professor Doohan said. She spoke about the green revolution. From her research and studies, how far back can she go in accessing data on crops? How many centuries can she go back?

Professor Fiona Doohan:

In terms of Irish crops and landraces, we have access to and research, as part of a Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine-funded project, what we call the heritage Irish wheat, barley and oats variety. We examine those varieties for traits we may have lost through current breeding. These are what are called landraces varieties grown in Ireland 150 years ago. Through the UK and places such as the John Innes Centre, we have excellent access to what is called the Watkins collection, as well as collections of cereals that are very well characterised over a long period of time, probably about 200 years. Does that answer the Senator's question?

Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

It does. I was wondering if Professor Doohan could go back a few thousand years, but that is not possible.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

We do. It depends on the crop but we know about it based on genetics. One of the great aspects of biotechnology - people often wonder why we should fund basic science and this is one of the reasons and it is very important - is that we learned a great deal from evolutionary biology studies as to where wheat came from, how it evolved, and based on that evolution and the fact that it evolved differently in China, in South America and in the Fertile Crescent, where it came from Iran. Because of that difference in evolution and genetics, we now look at those things that have evolved differently and see how we can use those in breeding programmes. We trace back with what are called the progenitors or the parents, the old ancestors of wheat from thousands of years ago. We have all that information and all the genomic sequence for that as well to follow and map that.

Michelle Mulherin (Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

When Professor Doohan talks about evolution, from her observations, she is not talking about observing a change in species of sorts, or anything like that.

Professor Fiona Doohan:

No. We are talking within a crop usually.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for attending today's meeting and making their presentation. They will have noted from the volume of questions that the committee found their presentation very interesting. We will suspend briefly to allow the witnesses in the second group to take their places.

Professor Mark Ferguson:

I thank the members for their time.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Peter Nallen, group chief operations officer, and Mr. Tom Bryan, agronomist, from Minch Malt Limited. I thank them for coming before the committee today. As they are aware, the committee is examining the future of the tillage sector in Ireland. I would like to hear their views on this matter from their perspective.

Before we begin, I bring to the witnesses' attention that witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the evidence they give to the committee. However, if they are directed to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter and they continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and they are asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that where possible they should not criticise nor make charges against any person or entity by name or in such way as to make him or her identifiable.

I invite Mr. Nallen to make his opening statement.

Mr. Peter Nallen:

I thank the Chairman, the clerk to the committee and the members for this opportunity. It is a privilege to be here and we look forward to giving the members a history of our current business in Ireland and outlining some of the plans, challenges and opportunities we see for the sector as we go forward.

The company we have established in Athy, County Kildare was founded in 1847. We have a long history of being a very important part of the farming and local community. The business, under its current owners, was acquired in March 2010 from the former Greencore Group. The company set out an ambitious strategy at that time to develop and increase its current production, which was approximately 67,000 tonnes of malt per annum, to bring it up to full capacity, and to do so by securing and winning business which would be servicing the Irish indigenous brewing and distilling industries.

We were looking for a local supply chain capable of producing malt locally and delivering that malt to very well-known Irish brewers and distillers. Currently, the operations part of that business is our plant in Athy, which is producing 98,000 tonnes of malt. This is close to full capacity. That has been achieved over the past seven years by the company investing a lot in the supply chain, in the facilities and equipment in the plant in Athy and by investing in the people and the research and innovation that we brought to the industry.

To give a general overview of our malting barley supply chain, one of the key figures that makes Irish malting barley supply chains stand out over other chains in our business is that it is fully traceable from seed to glass. That is unique and differentiates the Irish supply chain. It gives all our global customers a sense of security in terms of food safety and traceability to know that we can go back and examine specifically the field and tell our customers everything that happened to the crop in that field in a given year. That level of detail clearly needs a lot of data to be captured and that is done through one-to-one contact and one-to-one contracts with each of our 600-plus growers and that is done via our agronomy team. Again, one of the key differentiators that we have over competition here and across Europe is that the seed, which is the critical component in establishing the crop in the first place, is certified to be of a superior quality than anything else on the market. In addition, our fertiliser, which we do not supply but we recommend, and the chemicals which we do supply - all the programmes regarding the husbandry and crop management - are specifically customised to each specific field of each specific grower. We do not apply a carte blanche, one-solution-fits-all approach. It is very much hands-on with a lot of personal contact and time spent with growers to fully understand the challenges they face and trying to make sure that we bring those data together and are able to apply science in the right way to make sure that their crop every year is the best it can possibly be.

Our agriteam is 11 in number and where we are different and where we feel we are better than the other competition we have, either locally or in Europe, is that our team is wholly dedicated to the sustainable growing of malting barley. As they have no other distraction in terms of any other cereal crop, all of that expert knowledge and all of those expert data are being fed back into the business in order that we continue our year-on-year ambition to improve and get better. We are always future-proofing our business, which hopefully means we are future-proofing the economical livelihoods of all of those growers.

This is an important topic and we were very interested in hearing the previous session. We believe that communication is key. Communication comes in many forms and involves many contacts. Axereal is our parent and is a French company, the ownership of which is a co-operative of 13,000 French farmers. They bring a new perspective in terms of investing in agriculture and in our business. They take a much longer timeframe in terms of return on that investment and leaving a legacy for the next generation. Boortmalt itself is currently the fifth largest malting company in the world, headquartered in Antwerp in Belgium. Annually, it produces about 1.1 million tonnes of malt. To move forward and to continue to achieve the success that we have so far in our journey over the past seven years, it would not be possible without ongoing collaboration and co-operation with the IFA.

Before 2010, we had a very different business relationship with the IFA. Post 2010, we have seen new owners bring a new perspective, a new vision and a new openness regarding understanding what farmers need and what farmers will look for in terms of a livelihood and a future in the industry.

We have also developed significant relationships with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. As for conversations earlier today that referred to the pipeline of new varieties that are put forward every year and their testing from an agronomic point of view, we do further testing in the malting industry on the actual malt quality that can be determined from those varieties. Ultimately, with our consumers, we need to understand the liquid quality or the quality of that particular variety once it is transformed from malt ultimately into beer or indeed whiskey and how does it excite or delight our consumers.

We work very closely with Teagasc and have been building strong relationships with it over the past couple of years. To differentiate from comments in the previous session, Teagasc has run extremely accurate scientific trial centres in various locations where we have tried to be different. We have seen the diversification that happens across the different counties in which we source our barley, which include counties Louth, Meath, Kildare, Offaly, Galway, Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford and Waterford. Under our own trial programme, we have decided to invest annually about €1 million to make sure we are at the forefront of the industry on the island. We do so by moving and deploying those trial and research areas into those specific rural locations in order that we can actually figure out what does work in each of those specific growing counties. UCD has always been a positive source of assistance. Dr. Tom McCabe has done a lot of work with us in terms of building our own trials, understanding the output of those trials, because the data must be interpreted to make informed decisions and building a path to a better way of producing malting barley in Ireland. In our own field trial programme, somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 field trials take place right around the country annually. This leads to a huge amount of data coming in and allows us hopefully to make the best decisions in respect of variety selection and in placing varieties in each of those counties to maximise the potential benefits for growers in matching and balancing the impact of quality and yield.

As for our growers, we need each one of them to be able to have a viable sustainable income. We communicate with them throughout the year via leaflets and technical meetings. We do crop walks, they get written prescribed advice per field and we offer them spray programmes. If there is any immediate risk regarding potential crop quality during the growing season they get an immediate SMS or a telephone call. We host on-farm field evenings to try to impart knowledge and expertise. We host and invite growers and arrange for growers to visit all of the trials programmes and the trial plots we set up around the country. It is also important for them to see where the malting barley goes post-harvest when it is dried, stored and recovered from dormancy. We bring them in and show them the malting plant and the standards in food hygiene we require, as well as giving them an understanding of the transformation process that happens in the malting plant. Hopefully, they can then understand the impact of all of the detail we expect them to bring to the growing of malting barley and how that has an impact on that quality.As I said, we work with the IFA and as the Irish Farmers' Journalreaches a lot of people, we try to collaborate with it to cover pertinent topics that are important to driving, building and sustaining the industry.

The malting plant itself in Athy, County Kildare, currently covers about 10 acres. We have a green area members can see in the bottom corner of the accompanying diagram on which we hope to build and I might come to that later. To make sure that everybody in the room understands what we do, we are converting barley into a suitable raw material for the production of beer and whiskey.

The process change that we are able to control and drive within the plant means that we control the germination or growing of the barley under industrial conditions so that the starch in the barley is changed to allow sufficient enzyme activity. This will then deliver fermentable sugars which are used in the production of beer and whiskey.

On the basic process flow, we receive the barley at harvest time and this is dried and stored. The main processing steps are: steeping, whereby we hydrate the barley back up from 14% moisture to approximately 45% - this takes anywhere between 36 and 48 hours; germination, whereby we allow the starch to break down within the barley over a period of four to five days; and kilning, which is the drying process and which involves the use of a lot of energy to remove moisture so that the grain is suitable for long-term storage. Kilning results in the level of moisture being reduced to around 4% or 5%. The malt is then analysed in order that we can determine that it is suitable for customers. It is put in storage and then blended before being delivered to our Irish customers.

What we have come to understand over the past seven years in particular is that customer service is absolutely paramount. Central to that, as members can see in the diagram provided, innovation and research are key. One must understand where one's consumers and customers are going in terms of what they want in the context of product performance, both now and into the future. Customers like and demand that we have full control. In other words, we have to be hands-on regarding every part of the process - from seed through to production of the crop, harvesting, storing, transportation, processing and on to the consumer. One of the key changes that has happened in recent years is that we have feedback loops with all of our key customers and we communicate with them on a weekly basis. We are, therefore, able to tell how the product is performing in their business units within a couple of days. This allows us to adapt, change and flex our process so that we are always fully optimising what is delivered. This allows our Irish customers - a selection of whom we are very proud to supply - to fine-tune their processes, with a huge investment in technology right across the board, even among those producing craft beers, which can be seen from the bottom row of the diagram. The level of detail, sensitivity and attention to the variation they see from one truck to another truck means that it is a very precise process. In turn, the standards we are setting and those the industry needs going back down the line are targeted towards the very precise farming of malting barley.

I will conclude on the issue of sustainability. This is an important part of how we all work. As a business, our vision is to move forward into the future and ensure that our activities are more sustainable and, ultimately, if possible, carbon-neutral. We have invested hugely in the plant in Athy during the past seven years. Our capital expenditure runs to somewhere in the region of €1.52 million per annum in order to ensure that we are at the cutting edge in what we do. We always try, where possible, to minimise our impact on the environment. We were one of the very first members to join Origin Green. We love that initiative. We are in close contact with Bord Bia and we participated in a number of initiatives with it. We reached out to Bord Bia when we decided that we needed to build what is a world first, namely, our own sustainability scheme, which is specifically tailored for the growing of malting barley. At farm level, we have achieved a significant milestone this year. In August, our sustainability scheme - in the context of the way we work with our growers - was, as a result of an audit carried out under the sustainable agriculture initiative, certified as being silver status. This means that we and our growers have made commitments to continually work to improve the social, environmental and economic sustainability of their activities.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank Mr. Nallen. Are there any questions?

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their interesting presentation and will ask a couple of short questions. The company produces approximately 98,000 tonnes for Ireland and 130,000 tonnes is the overall Irish production, according to the information sheet provided. Do the witnesses know how much malt barley is imported to the country? Are we producing 70% to 80% of what is required or less than 60% of what is required? The submission mentions sustainability, current cereal prices and Irish producers and how it is open, transparent, market-leading and so on. The difficulty is that farmers have appeared before this committee who cannot get a better price for it. They point to the fact that the industry is held back by the difficulty of knowing whether it will continue to exist into the future and fewer and fewer farmers remain in the tillage sector. In that regard, what does Minch Malt consider its responsibility to be as one of the largest buyers for those farmers?

Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Offaly, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. Relating to Deputy Martin Kenny's question, could Mr. Nallen explain the pricing model please? I see that 50% of the farmers that are supplying to Minch Malt are availing of it. I wonder whether the farmers are satisfied with that or if Minch Malt is looking to increase that to 100%. Another question is whether there is a demand for organic produce. Furthermore, how do the witnesses feel about GM-produced barley?

Charlie McConalogue (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chairman. I am interested in hearing the response to Deputy Martin Kenny's question on import versus export, or import versus the use of entirely Irish-grown grain. As for the quality of the malt which is produced in Ireland; is the quality of the malt barley we can grow here considered to be significantly different to that grown in other countries? Specifically on the return for producers and growers, I would like to know more about the consistency of growers staying with Minch Malt or its experience of growers who continue to grow and supply at the level they had done previously. Is Minch Malt experiencing churn or are people departing the industry? Is there scope within the sector for better prices for farmers in the future?

Mr. Peter Nallen:

I will answer Deputy Martin Kenny first. At the outset of my presentation, I tried to clarify that the ambition of the business, when it was acquired in 2010, was to have a sustainable Irish malting barley supply chain. The ambition was to be 100% self-sufficient for the production of Irish malt, that is, to reach the full capacity of the production unit in Athy with all of that coming from Irish malting barley. That remains, ultimately, a key business objective every single year. As everyone present probably knows, however, barley itself is a product which can vary from year to year; it has some challenges based on climate etc. We have seen in the past couple of years that on occasion, the quality of the barley in certain years or in certain regions within those years has not been up to the standard that is demanded by our customers and which we in turn must impose in procuring a crop that meets a certain specification. Those years are becoming fewer, thankfully, as we evolve, get better and study the data with which we are now working. In the past couple of years we have not had to import malting barley at all.

To put some context on where the industry is going generally as we see it; in terms of brewing on the island, we are fairly full. The potential for future growth for brewing is pretty limited.

It is certainly going to be single-digit, and will be quite slow over time. That is due to the excellent work that the large global brewers on the island have done to consolidate brewing production and improve brewing efficiency in the brewhouse in order that they are able to extract more product from less raw materials. That is a challenge that they set themselves every year.

However, the key sector that we see as still having a huge opportunity for growth is distilling. Distilling is a different product. It needs a malting barley of different quality. The main differentiator between brewing and distilling is the protein level of the malting barley required. To steer and target the lower protein level, a different way of working with the barley has to be applied, along with different crop husbandry and different crop management. Going back to a comment that we heard at the other session today, as we move to satisfy the growing demand in the sector, we are learning very quickly that if things like the application of nitrogen, which traditionally farmers and growers would apply to help boost the yield of the crop and get the most return for themselves, are not done in a science-based way, there is a point where there is no return for additional nitrogen applied. There is a sweet spot within each crop, variety or product type towards which we are guiding growers. We do not want them applying what they have always applied typically or traditionally because they have always done it that way or at that time. We are doing it in a science-based way. They apply only what they need when they need to apply it. If we continue to work that way, with the success of the last couple of seasons, we are confident in and fully committed to building a supply chain in Ireland which is able to satisfy the needs of the malting plant in terms of production.

Looking ahead, that is going to be very important. As I mentioned briefly in the introduction, the supply and demand for distilling is looking very positive. We are prepared, and we are preparing our planning application to increase the size of our production facility in Athy. To do that, we need either to go out to our current list of 600 growers and encourage them to grow more malting barley for us, specifically for distilling, or else entice other cereal growers to switch to growing malting barley. They will have to do it the Boortmalt way, however. Otherwise we cannot be sure about the integrity of the supply chain, and the full traceability from field to glass that we have to commit to as a business.

On the pricing model, which several Deputies raised, we have moved in recent years through a lot of positive and constructive discussion with the Irish Farmers Association, IFA, away from the very typical situation of a one-day, one-price, smoke-filled room test of endurance to see who was the last man standing over the last 50 cent per tonne. Thankfully, we have moved away from that. The model we have today is without doubt, and I am not shy in saying it, the most sophisticated pricing model for malting barley that exists in Europe. What we allow and what we have developed with our growers and key customers is a system whereby growers can take control of what they price and what commitment they make in terms of pricing and hedging of their crop tonnage over a full year. That is complemented by a number of fixed pricing offers, roughly four of which are made throughout the year, as well as the hedging opportunity. Typically, every Wednesday of the season there is a matif wheat price. Linked to that, there is a slight deduction for Irish malting barley, because 100% of the Irish crop has to be dried and stored, unlike crops in France and most of the UK bar Scotland, and we incur a significant add-on cost on our supply chain by doing that. There is an adjustment factor, which has been agreed upon with the IFA, built into that model. Again, the farmer gets information from our business which he can look up online.

Matif wheat prices are available on the Internet right now. They are able to see exactly what price they can take today or tomorrow regarding their own commitments. Our guidance to growers over the last couple of years has been to commit a little and often, so that they do not get caught by the vagaries of the market when it shifts high or low. They are able to insulate or protect themselves from that.

To try to encourage growers to move to that way of thinking, we actually engaged with a well-known national economist, Paul Sommerville. He did a lot of workshops with clusters of growers right around the country, in full co-operation and collaboration with the IFA. That was to illustrate and give real worked out examples to growers and to explain to them how much better off they are working in a fixed hedging model than going back to the traditional one day, one hour in September arrangement. The statistics show us that over the last five years we started off year one with only 5% or 6%, so a poor start. We revitalised the campaign. We try to highlight to the growers the positives because over the last number of years there has been a clear tangible financial benefit in euro per tonne that the grower can win by working with the model. We have tried to show that every year. To make it clear when the growers get their grain statement we highlight all the positions that they chose to take or chose not to take. We also illustrate the price they could have obtained if they had taken each of the options as they became available. The default option is that if growers choose not to participate at all, then they take a September price. However, in trying to work with the IFA we agreed that a day in September is maybe too much of a roll of the dice, so we split it over three dates that they pick in September. It is really over three weeks. It is trying to avoid that in the very week the price in matif could be set, it could be the bottom of a cycle for something else, or the top. We now spread it over the average of three dates. Based on our data, we are seeing that 50% of growers are happy and they are better off working with the model. The other 50% have yet to warm to that concept and they prefer to just wait and take what is the average of those three dates in September as a price.

On Deputy Corcoran Kennedy's question on organic produce, that is a new niche area for us. We are really excited about that. The interest in that came from the craft sector initially. We are seeing a lot of craft brewers and distillers looking to again stand out from the crowd. There are significant challenges in having a fully organic supply chain. We are the only accredited organic supplier. This requires that not only the barley be accredited but also the drying process, the storage process and, indeed, through the full malting process. We are currently the only company on the island which can fully certify every single kilogram of organic malt at every single step of that supply chain. We do that partly because of our ambition to try to listen to what our customers want and to try to be flexible. There are, however, big challenges particularly in relation to the economics of that because it is significantly more costly. It is more costly because we are finding that growing organically impacts on the yield, which was mentioned at the earlier session today. Irish growers are world class in what they do. That is without doubt. We see it in our business. I look after malting plants across seven countries and we see that the Irish yields are without doubt year-on-year absolutely top of the table. The growers know exactly what to do. The big shock they get is when they move, or try to, move to organic produce. They see the whole yield plummet. In terms of where we come in, when the yield plummets, we also see significant challenges in the processing of that crop.

Given the grading or screening levels, it can be a very different grain compared to the typical crop in that year, in terms of shape, size, performance or water uptake. There is another hit then in the conversion yield, which growers do not really see, but we see as a business, that is, how many kilogrammes of malts come out when one puts in one tonne of barley. We see a huge impact there. Naturally then when all of that is added up, one needs to be fully committed to the organic mantra to be prepared to pay a princely sum, as a customer, to have certification all the way through from a field.

In response to Deputy Corcoran Kennedy on genetically modified products, we take our steer from our customers. We are in business because we are delivering what our customers need or are exceeding their expectations. Until our customers come knocking on the door saying they really love genetically modified products, it will be some time before that change takes place. Again, if one looks at some of the customers we mentioned in our brief, they are global brands and they will not run the risk in the very short term until they are very sure about consumer perception. In the digital age and in the age of social media, something very small can travel very quickly. They are very much risk-averse, and rightly so, with the brand they have built up.

Having said that, we are currently working on projects in Africa, and if there were to be genetically modified malting barley available which would thrive in water-stressed areas, for example, then that would add a whole new layer of economic self-sufficiency and sustainability to those emerging countries. Right now in Ireland, however, we are not seeing any interest in going in that direction.

Some questions on the quality of malting barley were asked. In the world we live in, every customer has his or her own specifications, not only for the final product that we deliver, but also for the raw material we are allowed to use in producing that product. Strictly speaking, one can get country-to-country variations in a malting barley specification, but they usually reflect some of the challenges or inherent difficulties of growing a crop in that country. In Ireland, it means that the big global brewers generally prefer protein levels which are slightly lower than they would be on a global level. We have a slightly different specification, but in the event of a force majeureaffecting an Irish crop and if barley had to be imported into the country from France, the UK or Scandinavia, as a business we would still be able to make that match with a customer's malt specification.

Return for growers was mentioned. We are working very closely, which we realise is the only way to work, with the Irish Farmers' Association, IFA, in particular. We deal with it because it represents all the growers, not one or two individuals. It is important that we have a body representing those interests nationally, as opposed to some local or parochial interest. Certainly, the model that was introduced has been a success but it probably can be improved. The matif wheat is probably not the right commodity to which we should link. It can move to a new commodity. Unfortunately, other commodities, such as Chicago wheat or euro-wheat, are not liquid enough right now. There is not enough activity in those markets. Having said that, we are looking forward to further developing the model in the future. The model we have right now is agreed for a period of two years. We are currently looking to see what improvements we can make to try to make sure growers can get the best price for their crop every year.

The other key point, to go back to Deputy Corcoran Kennedy's remark, is that we would strongly encourage all growers to participate in the pricing mechanism or model that we have. Our ambition is to drive that 50% number much higher over time.

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Chairman, I am not clear. I asked about the importation of malting barley. The witness says that he imports none but how much malting barley is imported into Ireland? I am sure there are others importing it.

Mr. Peter Nallen:

No, there should be none. I can only speak for my own business. There is another malting company in Cork. The parents of that company are two very large co-ops and I am sure they have the expertise to make sure to secure enough malting barley on an annual basis for their production in Cork, so there should be no need. The only reasons to import, as I said earlier, would be if a force majeuresituation arose or if there were quality reasons. We had one year when the entire Irish malting barley crop went high-protein, so we had zero malting barley for distilling.In that case, we had no choice but to reach out through our contacts within Boortmalt in Europe and secure barley of the right protein level, otherwise the barley would not perform in the distilleries. Does that answer your question?

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Yes.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I call Senator Paul Daly, then Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Chairman. I would like to revisit the pricing issue, which was mentioned by a number of members. With the greatest of respect to Mr. Nallen, to cut to the chase, it is not the model of the pricing, or how it is construed or come up with that is the issue. When one talks to the farmers, and we have had representatives before the committee, the bottom line is that the witness is buying a product that they cannot produce for price he is giving them. When labour, input costs and land are taken, the price per tonne in a good year is break-even. If farmers were not getting a basic CAP payment - if they were not being subsidised - they would not be able to produce. They would not have an income. Going forward with his model, does the witness have a contingency plan in case there is a reduction in the CAP subvention, or if the whole CAP situation changes? That is a possibility. We hope it does not arise but it is a possibility because of Brexit and the black hole created by the British leaving the EU.

Mr. Nallen is building and modifying the business, and using all the scientific methods available to him. He is doing a fine job and is probably a world leader. However, he is piggybacking on producers who can only produce what he is buying at the price he pays them because they are being subsidised by the EU. In other words, if they did not have the CAP payment, it would not be a viable proposition for them, based on the price he is giving. How is that model going to continue if there are changes?

Mr. Peter Nallen:

As I have said, we have ongoing discussions through the IFA where we are looking at the next version of the model. There is another meeting tomorrow. We will be taking into consideration the potential changes or challenges that may arise from Brexit, be it a hard or soft one. We also look at the value for money of our crop under the Teagasc costings, which are produced on an annual basis. Looking at that, one will see that if malting barley is not the top tillage crop in the country it is certainly the second. There is a viable and sustainable income to be made growing malting barley.

One of the questions that was raised earlier, which maybe I did not answer, concerned the loyalty of our growers. We have more expressions of interest than we have people leaving and no longer growing malting barley. On an annual basis, out of 600 growers I would guess that we might have less than five or six who choose, for different reasons, to exit the growing of malting barley. I would say we have about ten times that inquiring about having a malting barley contract. For us, those are positive signals that the industry is doing something right.

Are we fully there yet? The answer is "No". Are we working in a better way, and are we working better this year than last year? I believe we are. I think all of the facts, figures and statistics, over the last seven years in particular, show that it is an industry which is going places.

It has a future. There is a future if all of us, stakeholders, growers, ourselves, brewers and distillers, are committed to having a fully Irish supply chain with Irish barley, Irish malt, Irish whiskey and Irish beer. We are looking then at an even more significant requirement going forward. We are looking at 60,000 ha this year and we expect that to be even more next year. Expressions of interest far exceed the contrary.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The witness said Minch Malt liaises with Teagasc and that he has the production figures.

Mr. Peter Nallen:

Yes.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

What is the average profit, on the price that Minch Malt is paying per tonne, for the farmer based on the Teagasc figures? I refer to payment on the actual product, without subsidisation and the CAP payment. Based on the Teagasc input figures and the price Minch Malt is paying, how much profit can a farmer hope to get on production of one tonne, or per acre based on average yield?

Mr. Peter Nallen:

Perhaps Mr. Bryan can comment on that.

Mr. Tom Bryan:

I have two comments. I am actually a malting barley grower as well an agronomist. I know the farmer's perspective-----

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The witness is being questioned by a farmer.

Mr. Tom Bryan:

-----and the other side as well. It is approximately €150 per acre in round figures, excluding the single farm payment.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Is that €150 per acre?

Mr. Tom Bryan:

Per acre.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

What kind of yield is that based on?

Mr. Tom Bryan:

It is based on an average yield of about three tonnes per acre or 3.1 tonnes per acre. There are people we have measured who are up around 3.8 tonnes per acre.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Is it €50 per tonne?

Mr. Tom Bryan:

Thereabouts, yes.

Paul Daly (Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

As is said in a different situation, "I rest my case.".

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I call Deputy Michael Fitzmaurice.

Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentation. In a year that Minch Malt does not get the protein that was mentioned, does it hold its Origin Green status? In the line of price, the witnesses mentioned meeting the IFA. Do the brewers and distillers and everyone come together then? At the end of the day, Minch Malt is meeting one party that it is buying something from. The farmer is a price taker.

The witnesses have spoken about the moisture. They spoke about it costing more in other countries and that it costs more to ship it here. Why does Minch Malt not do a five year term? This committee has examined adding one or two cents to the price of a pint. This would bring a farmer up to a good standard of living.

As Senator Daly rightly pointed out, is it not a damnable thing to say that if a farmer had an acre of trees in forestry he would get more out of the grant for them, including the single farm payment, than he would to grow what Minch Malt want grown as a commodity for Irish people.

Mr. Peter Nallen:

On the Origin Green point, I am not sure we had it the year in question when we had to import the malting barley from France, which was low protein. It is something we can definitely check. I do not know the answer. I will come back on that point.

In terms of the duration of a deal, that is agreed between Minch Malt and the IFA representing the growers. It is mutually agreed. We have not set any minimum or maximum time on that. The feeling in the IFA is that, as we move to encourage more take-up of the model and once the model is moving toward a higher proportion of people working in that way, then the maturity might be there to move to a longer term, beyond the current two year deal. Typically, it has been on a two year deal.

In regard to viability, and the income of our growers supplying what is a quality product, I cannot comment on that. I have no experience of what is available in other industries.

Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I will tell the witness. Farmers get €200 an acre to sow spruce trees on the land.

The single farm payment is on top of that, and is guaranteed for 15 years. Does the witness not think it is an insult to farmers to have to survive on that?

Mr. Peter Nallen:

Again, to be clear, in the grower contracts that we put out, which we are very pleased the growers currently accept, they have a free choice about whether they are signed every year. The decision to grow or not to grow malting barley for Minch Malt in Ireland is really down to the individual grower. I am sure many of them are very astute and clever business people. We have many very professional people as part of our grower base. Clearly, for them it seems to make sense. I am sure there are exceptions to every rule. Ultimately, the decision rests with each individual grower. I cannot speak about when growers sit down to do a business plan for their farms. I am sure that they are free to evaluate all the business opportunities or potential their farms can allow them.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Okay. Are there any further questions?

Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

Is there something we are missing? I do not get it. I do not get why a farmer would grow malting barley at that price. Is there something missing here that we do not see? It does not seem to make sense that if they can make a much better profit in other areas that they would continue to do it. Is there something that the witness is not telling us about where growers are getting money from in this? Is the straw going to give them a large profit or something else? I cannot see it and I just wonder is there something missing.

Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

That is the reason we are having a discussion here about the future of the tillage sector. We have had different representatives before us showing the lack of profitability in the tillage sector and the problem is acreage is dropping year by year. That is the reason that we are analysing the sector and analysing where it is going. In fairness, the witnesses have answered the question about the price they are paying for malting barley. They are being supplied and there are plenty of contracts so they have answered the question from their viewpoint. It is up to us to put our report together about where we see the future of the sector going. We heard this side of the story from the malting sector today.

I thank the witnesses for their presentation and answering the questions. As they can see from the questions asked, the committee is worried about where our industry is going. We lost our sugar beet industry and we are seriously worried about the acreage of our cereal sector. I thank the witnesses very much for their presentations.

Mr. Peter Nallen:

The members are very welcome.