Mr. Jonny Greene:

That is fine. As a country, there are some big stories coming down the road in respect of water quality or carbon dioxide. All of these issues are coming at us like a steam train. Carbon can often be a dirty word.

We see carbon in our soil as good. What we want to do is take it out of the atmosphere and put it in our soil. That is a win for us and a win for the environment. We are looking at systems that do that.

The best way of getting carbon out of the air is photosynthesis. One of our principles, as Mr. O'Flaherty mentioned, right at the start was a constant growing crop. My aim within my farm is to always have a growing root in the ground and always have a leaf photosynthesising every day of the year. One sees a lot of systems, say, a spring barley system out there now, where the crop would be planted in March and come out in August. It is in the ground for five months of the year and for seven months the ground is left fallow. That is bad for soil life because the soil life feed - they convert this through the root exudates which are photosythesised down. This is - a bit of a cliché - about the circle of life and how everything is working in dependency. What we are trying to put within our farmers are measures that keep that going. As long as we can keep plants photosythesising, we will put carbon.

We will have less fossil fuels coming into the country if we go down this road. We will have less inorganic fertilisers being used and production of nitrogen fertiliser is a significant cause of global emissions. We are trying to reduce all that. This is a good news story for us. It is a good news story for the environment and the country, and policies within it. The only one it might not a good news story for is the industry which sells us the fertilisers and the diesel. That may be why, worldwide, as Mr. McAuley stated, there has not been a significant amount of research dollars invested in this area. There are not too many who will benefit from it but the farmers and their environment will.