Professor Mark Keane:

I am a professor of computer science in UCD. I have spent the past two years talking to agriculture researchers. I now know more about hoggets and grass than I thought could possibly be learned. We need to think in a very broad way. Ms McCormack mentioned the notion of a systemic view. I will not criticise people because they have their own businesses and are looking at the bottom line and what they get for what they sell, but we must think of the farmer as sitting within a much wider environment and system. Part of that system is the sustainability aspect so we are going to start paying money as fines for polluting the environment. Can we not have a governmental scheme that will feed back some of that as an income to farmers to get them to change behaviour, which would then reduce the amount of pollution going into the environment? That is one example of another system that we must take into account as well as the core production of food system.

The information technology system will become very important. Precision agriculture is based completely on the notion of data. At present, we have one model for data, namely, that Google and Facebook own it all, but we are seeing that this model is disappearing and that people will own their own data. If a company like a processor depends upon a whole community of farmers to produce a given product and depends on the data those farmers have, this will also become another source of income for those farmers. We must realise that we are on the point of a step change in how we do agriculture. If we get this right and think about it in a systematic way, we will see that there are other sources of income that are available and that this should improve the lot of farmers in the environment, but we need to think that way and it must be done in a regulatory way as well. Government must think about it because nobody else is going to do it. The processors are not going to do it because they will have their own agenda. We need someone in a God-like situation overseeing the system and organising that properly so that we move on to this new stage.