Mr. Conor Mulvihill:

A governance and action plan is currently being laid out whereby the dairy industry is to commit advisers to work with dedicated Government personnel through Teagasc and the local authorities around the country to achieve on-the-ground solutions. All key stakeholders involved in the dairy sustainability initiative are fully committed to this initiative.

In terms of what has been committed to, all of the processing dairy companies at all levels will fully support this new sustainability drive to achieve improved on-farm sustainability outcomes. This work will be supported up the supply chain by the specialised nutrition Dairy Industry Ireland members. Dairy Industry Ireland members will provide and fund ten full-time sustainability advisors to work within a shared partnership strategy and governance within the new agricultural sustainability support and advisory programme, ASSAP. These sustainability advisers will work cohesively and in an integrated way with the Teagasc teams and staff, and all will be trained with the Teagasc team to the same standard. The sustainability advisers will, in turn, support an internal change programme within the companies as part of this new programme. All dairy industry personnel in direct contact with farmers will be trained in this new approach and there will be work within the partnership to develop a new communications strategy to support on-farm sustainability and climate change best practice. In addition, the co-operatives' communication channels with their suppliers and supplier network structures will be utilised to drive this new strategy.

What we are aiming for in terms of early outcomes is that current company farm pilots for nutrient management programme best practice will be expanded from the current pilot phase of six co-operatives across the 11 processing co-operatives during 2018, so there will be immediate progress. Two new pilots will be established with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Teagasc and the Environmental Protection Agency to understand and devise best practice in critical source areas to break nutrient pathways. That refers to the point made by Dr. Matthew Crowe of the EPA on areas where water is declining very rapidly. The processing companies will actively promote the implementation of the new nitrates action programme across those companies and involving all dairy farmers. The co-operatives will seek that all dairy farmers implement best practice in nutrient management practice by 2021 and they will support the development of new approaches and best practice regarding the broader sustainability and climate change agenda.

We see that this is only phase 1. We have heard the issues raised by the earlier contributors in terms of renewable energy but if we do not get water and soil right, we cannot go on to look at the bigger picture of climate change mitigation, be it through solar panels or otherwise. I thank committee members for their time.