Ms Louise Byrne:

Stakeholders have called for this data to be available in real time, thus making it accessible by farmers. We are saying this is a new system and we must bed it in. The data will come into the national fertiliser database and, primarily, the information will be fed in by the fertiliser economic operators. Let us walk before we run and over time the data will be given back to farmers. At the moment the information is in the form of reports on the system. As time progresses and once we have the system bedded in, we can then look at other opportunities for sharing that information. A farmer will always get access to his own data and a merchant will always get access to the data on fertiliser that he or she sold. Over time, that is where we want to get to so that the new system will be useful for farmers to use to inform their management decisions on their farms.