Dr. Frank O'Mara:

I would add a fourth point to the three the Chair has made. There is a lot of uncertainty around how our land, our peatlands in particular, are performing as regards carbon emissions or the potential for sequestration. We are on a good track to reduce that uncertainty, so that is a positive. Certainly, when we talk to farmers about this, many of them want to continue farming on these lands, but maybe if they thought there were very big incentives, they might have a different view. They are very anxious to hear that they can continue to farm, so the partial rewetting is very important research we are doing so that you could, apart maybe from the shoulder seasons of the year, continue to graze a lot of these drained lands. Carbon farming is already a phrase that is commonly used by people within agriculture and we are all anxious to see the colour of what that might look like. The bringing forward of the parameters of what carbon farming might look like will be a very important development over the next few months, and we will see that then translate here nationally.

I am not an expert on the harvesting of sphagnum and its potential use as a substitute for moss peat. We have a research programme on substitutes for peat moss for the horticulture industry that started last year. It is certainly something we will mention to our research colleagues involved in that programme.