Dr. Frank O'Mara:

I totally agree with the Deputy. We need to avoid perfection being the enemy of the good. Our role here is to do the research and the knowledge transfer advisory work. I can assure the Deputy that on the research side, we are really ramping up what we are doing. This whole area is probably the highest the priority we have at the moment. We are not just waiting for the research before we start talking to farmers. There is quite a bit going on with farmers as Dr. Richards mentioned. There are a number of European innovation partnerships, EIPs, in this area. We have also the Signpost farm programme which is our main method of bringing knowledge out to farmers - all farmers, not just those with peat soils - about what they can do on their farms to reduce their emissions or increase their removals either through hedgerows or whatever. That is a programme with over 120 demonstration farms around the country, of which many have peat. We are working with those farmers on what they can do on their own farms and we will be significantly increasing that. We will be announcing a significant increase in our resource allocation towards both advisory and research work on 1 December. To set this in some bit of context, the whole idea of "carbon farming" is much talked about and at EU level, there is quite a bit happening to try to bring this into the Common Agricultural Policy. The Commission brought out a paper about a year ago on its vision or view about carbon farming and it is due to bring out another set of guidelines by the end of the month. How we can incentivise very large numbers of farmers, not just those in an EIP scheme, to do the type of things we want to do in this space, is a developing area. On our side, at the research and knowledge transfer level we are pedalling fairly hard and the policymakers are working fairly hard as well to try to move this area along. It is a big area and bringing practice change is always challenging but there is an urgency there to do it.