Professor Gerry Boyle:

I agree with the Deputy's remarks about Tipperary, as I am sure the Chairman would. I will ask my colleague to pick up on the issue of challenges in increasing the level of land devoted to organic farming. The Deputy asked questions about land type. As he is aware, by far the largest group of farmers are involved in organic production. That is perfectly understandable because it is a sector that has a low chemical usage footprint so the obstacles to conversion to organic farming are not as great as in other sectors. Therefore, for any land that is suitable for livestock production, which would include a lot of hill land and, indeed, land suitable for sheep production, expansion would be expected to occur in those sectors.

The Deputy raised a comment on the resources devoted to organics within Teagasc. I will not go back over my earlier comments on research. When it comes to the advisory side, Teagasc tries to allocate its resources, roughly, in respect of the economic value of the different sectors. That is something we pay very close attention to. Before the recession, we had four, what we call, specialists involved in organics. The current position is that we have two on a national basis. I set out in my opening statement a commitment to employ an additional specialist adviser, which will be a total complement of three. I am sure many committee members will say that is not enough, but I ask them to bear in mind that we have a total of five specialists engaged in dairy production. That will give them an idea that I consider three specialists to be a number commensurate with the value of the output from the organic sector.

Of course, we would like to have more but it is important we put the figure in context. Specialist advisers operate at a national level and give direction to the service at a regional level. Those three specialist advisers, and there will be three of them in place in the not too distant future, will feed into a network of approximately 15 advisers who work in our 12 advisory regions throughout the country. Obviously, they have other work to perform but we consider that is a significant resource commitment.

The Deputy mentioned the work at Solohead. Again, I instanced that in my earlier reply to Senator Daly. The work we are doing at Solohead has applicability to conventional dairy systems but our focus on grassland production and, in particular, minimising chemical usage is obviously very relevant to the organic sector. We are learning quite a lot about how farmers can minimise the use of chemical inputs, thereby saving on expensive inputs on the one hand and boosting profitability on the other, but also, very importantly, reducing their environmental footprint.

Before I ask my colleague to comment on the wider challenges, I wish to say that organic farming clearly demands an exceptional level of management performance, irrespective of the sector. That means farmers must be trained to a very high level. We see our educational programmes as being particularly important in this respect. We will be looking to expand the opportunities for education and training into the future. Dr. Ryan might respond to the question of challenges faced.