Mr. John Dolan:

As I said earlier on, we are actually merchants ourselves. We have successfully trialled this technology over just the past few weeks. We started at Christmas but needed the weather to do it. As was mentioned earlier, quite a large proportion of bulk spreading contractors among merchants throughout the country are capable of adopting this technology. The reason they do not want to do so is that there is an additional cost involved. Men have to be sent out to mark out fields. Staff need to be trained to upload and download data using the software. It is just not viable when a contractor is only getting paid so much per tonne to spread.

If the farmer were incentivised to look for this technology and paid to use it, the contractors could in turn charge more of a premium on top for this sort of work. It makes sense.