Mr. Richard Kennedy:

I will leave the last issue to the end, but I will pick up on the Deputy's points in a different order. With regard to the butterfat, I have not seen any work on that. We will work with Teagasc on that. That is very simple because one can do the analysis and follow through. It is not something that we would have seen or expected.

On the persistency, I am not overly concerned about the persistency because of the performance we are getting. The persistency is coming through. It is more about getting farmers to adopt it and to change their management practices slightly.

I believe there is a real opportunity in crops. Having spoken with people in the last while, I would be focusing on crops such as beans and fava beans in particular. They are leguminous crops and within a good rotation it would be very valuable. Not alone do we need cereals such as wheat, barley and maize to be replaced, we also need and it would be very valuable to have protein sources. I commend the legislature on bringing through the crop incentives. It is going to be tight this year but I believe it is something we should continue with.

If someone was to inquire what the ask is, it is a carbon soil analysis and LiDAR, light detection and ranging, analysis to the requisite level across the country that would be available to industry - not just to Devenish and farmers but to industry. It is a phenomenal resource to farming because it measures what we have in the bank. It shows us what we own, what we have and what we have worked for against guesswork or otherwise. To be fair to the Northern Ireland Executive, it has done that and I think it is an incredible thing. It would set this island apart. It would be a very strong, definitive statement for us as a food-producing island to say we are taking this seriously, we are at the forefront of delivering sustainable solutions and we will build from here. We should talk about investing in future generations and rural economies. It is a little bit like some of the things that have been done in the past. People look back and ask whether that was the right thing to do. It is absolutely the right thing to do and particularly as we see the headwinds that are in front of us around carbon.

My fear of bureaucracy is that if we do not have strong policy and strong, positive proactive farming leadership on this then bureaucratic solutions will be imposed on us from outside, which is much worse. We have things we can learn from in the past and maybe from some of what the Deputy talked about around how we did our forestry or whatever. Consider what happened in terms of peat, however. The picture was painted for us well in advance but we did not take the proactive positive steps I think we can now with this. My concern is this. We talk about bureaucracy. Bureaucracy might be worse than where we are but when one is not allowed to do something, no matter how bureaucratic it is, that is the worst-case scenario.

As I said, we have the soils and we actually have the climate and temperatures. We have an island that has the potential to be baselined to deliver a starting point as to how we can deliver sustainable solutions, and where farmers can work together with one another and their communities and also with their processors and co-operatives to really build a sustainable food production system from the ground up. The world is changing at an incredible rate. As I said to Senator Higgins, the pressures and challenges that are being exerted on very large food producing companies around their environmental, social, and governance, ESG, requirements - they are not just commitments, they are requirements now - will have a massive impact. We can capitalise on that.