Mr. Jonny Greene:

Yes. The clover grows lower. As soon as the milling wheat, I hope, is harvested in this case, the clover will come through and we might get a grazing for lambs over the winter. It will continue to produce nitrogen as clover is a legume. That will in turn allow us to reduce the bagged fertiliser nitrogen input into the farm. Nature loves diversity.

I do not know how many cover crops in fields the members have seen but we are trying to mimic a forest. Nature does not do monoculture and if one goes to a woodland or natural grassland, there are bushes, trees, grasses and flowers. It is what we are trying to mimic. There would be something in there for every little pest, insect, beetle, bird and everything else. It is about having balance in our fields rather than having one particular element. This comes back to the question of how quickly we can wean ourselves off pesticides. We must have prey before we have a predator. When we moved to a system, the first thing to move in was a slug, and that came before the ground beetle, which eats slug eggs, etc. The balance comes in time.

The difficulty with getting into the system is knowing how long to hold off so the pest does not dominate and give us crop or yield loss. This is where we must play a little bit of a waiting game and be a little pragmatic in how we go. We have greatly reduced the amount of insecticides we use on our farm and we have used just one spray insecticide in the past two and half years. Five years ago we were using two or three on most crops. We are doing this slowly, learning as we go. We have taken one or two little bangs with yield here and there but the cost saving is currently leaving us in a better position.

Senator Daly asked where it all started but I do not really know. A few of us got together over a cup of coffee one day and we were looking at a few things. We started comparing notes, we got together and three of us decided to form a committee. The original BASE group, from which we took our name, is in France and it has over 1,000 members practising similar techniques. There is another group in England with more than 100 members, BASE UK. We decided to align ourselves with them just so we would have a few friends out there from whom we could learn. Basically, our first annual general meeting was in 2014 and we had 14 members but we are now up to 60. We do not go looking for new members but we let them come to us. It is a system of farming that one must want to do. Coming back to the schemes, one must go in for the right reasons.

There was an eco-tillage movement 25 years ago and it went in for cost savings on fuel and machinery. It did not quite work. If somebody goes in for the right reasons, such as increasing soil fertility, and starts from the ground up, like any organisation or system, it will start to work naturally.

Senator Daly asked about long-term rules and reductions. It is a difficult point. We do not want a position where we might be trying to sell a product as a conservation or low-input system but then somebody does not follow through. Residue testing is getting tighter all the time. The numbers add up and we can get to the cost savings in a minute. The people who have started down this road get hooked on it and what they were blind to before becomes very obvious. It is no different from a child taking a nature walk; when one goes out to look at birds, bees and ladybirds, the work they do and the diversity in the fields becomes obvious. We are hoping that is what will bring us through. The policing will come down to residue testing, I would imagine, if we were to go down the road of looking for premiums. If we can produce crops with less agri-chemical residue, it would be probably be more nutritionally balanced and enhanced food.

The question was asked of why greening has not worked. The foundations of what it tried to do, such as the three-crop rule and rotation, were sound agricultural practice. A crop must be grown where it is suited but people with fragmented farms had three crops here, there and everywhere. The policy was there for the right reasons but the farmers were not going into it for the right reasons. There was a little bit of a disjointed thinking along there. We should absolutely review the green, low-carbon, agri-environment scheme, GLAS, as it must be improved. More farmers must be encouraged to join, especially young farmers. It is a way into farming and perhaps we can get young farmers practising these ways and give them a financial benefit along the way. That would be great.

Mr. McAuley might have the cost savings from the initial submission to the committee. The most obvious cost savings at the tillage end are in machinery and cultivation costs as we are not doing half the number of passes through a field. Teagasc cost and returns figures have it at €174 per hectare to establish a crop but our members are doing it for approximately €75; there would be one fewer tractor in the field and much less diesel used. Figures are between 33 to 49 litres of diesel per hectare in a normal one-pass plough within a conventional system while we are approximately 9 litres to 18 litres. Basically, we are running machines a lot less through fields.

I will speak about my farm briefly. We have been in the system for a number of years now and Deputy Deering has visited us. Perhaps he might not come in January next time and it might not be so cold. It would be nicer this time of year.