Mr. Paul Price:

The Deputy is right that I am not bringing technologies to the table but this meeting is about opportunities. I am afraid the opportunity is, basically, to go back to 2010 and look at where we were then because we were heading in the right direction. We had promises of technologies that would help us to continue moving in the right direction with Food Harvest and that was continued with Food Wise and Food Vision. That is the vision we have had and the result has been more emissions, more methane and greater use of nitrogen. The amount of nitrogen fertiliser being used each year has increased from 300,000 tonnes in 2010-11 to 400,000 tonnes today. That is an increase of one third. It is not doing more production with the same or less. It is just doing more production with more and producing more emissions with more. That is the vision we have been given. I am saying we have an opportunity to rethink that vision. However, I am not going to offer the committee a particular vision. It is up to the members to decide, as policymakers and so forth. I am just trying to explain what the science says.

I used Denmark as an example because it produces a lot of animal agriculture. Overall, there is more crop production in Europe generally. We should think about food security and pollution and so forth by using less nitrogen fertiliser than we were using in 2010. Right now, according to our targets, we will still be using more fertiliser in 20230 than we were in 2010. I am suggesting that is a bad vision. It is unacceptable in view of everything we are talking about and the need to reduce emissions. The opportunity is to return to where we were. We have gone along this road and put ourselves in a more difficult position than we needed to be in. That is resulting in all the things we are talking about. There is talk in the news today about offering retirement to dairy farmers. Why did we have to get to this point? We did not need even more milk production and now we will have to retire dairy farmers. That does not seem to have been a very sensible way to go about this.

On the family farm, what we see all over Europe, and are seeing in Ireland, is fewer family farms. The vision has been to have more dairy on top of beef farming. That is what actually happened but we were told by the experts and the science that, in order to keep emissions at the same level, we would have to have far fewer beef cattle, far less beef cattle farming and far fewer small family farms. What has happened in Europe with milk production is that it has become a big commodity. All over Europe, there are fewer farms producing the milk. There is a film on Netflix called "The Milk System". Members can watch that film and see what has happened elsewhere, such as in the USA with carbon credits and so forth. Small farmers are being taken advantage of and they lose control of their carbon credits. All these systems have been hugely problematic and that is the history of them. There has been a collapse in the carbon credit system in Australia as well. These are technologies and ideas that are not actually achieving what we want them to do and they also endanger clear carbon accounting. The way we have gone is a threat to the family farm but it is also a threat to carbon accounting. Having these kinds of technology discussions without saying what we are actually about here is a problem.