Dr. Stan Lalor:

I thank Senator Daly for the question. Coming at it from the perspective of being in the farmer’s shoes, I will deal with this with my area of responsibility overlapping both education and the advisory programme in Teagasc. There are two parts to that. As the opening statement outlines, we are very involved in the education of farmers in the early stages of their farming career, but the ongoing support of farmers through the advisory service is key to that as well. One of the big areas in that is how we reach as many farmers as possible. We have between 40,000 and 45,000 farmer clients who are contracted and avail of contractual services from Teagasc, but we also have a public good remit to reach all farmers. How we do that is very important. The Senator mentioned things such as online developments in the past number of years. We are constantly focusing on things such as digital communications, use of webinars and so on. Not only farmers but the general public are facilitated by Covid in terms of accelerating the adoption of some of those and the openness to some of those technologies, and that is highly used.

The other area that is important as well is within continuing professional development, CPD, there are things one can do in terms of accredited activities. Those are good but they are high-level engagement from a farmer point of view. We are also constantly looking at the way we can reach farmers and deliver information to them, and the use of short training courses, particularly workshops. We are utilising workshops more and more. I will give two examples of that. We have a comprehensive signpost advisory programme now in operation in Teagasc that launched just under a year ago. Delivery of information to farmers through workshops is an important lever of that programme because it is an efficient way to reach high numbers of farmers. In addition, at a smaller scale but equally impactful is the DairyBeef 500 programme, which is trying to promote opportunities that may be there for some farmers with dairy beef systems. Workshops and short courses for farmers who are coming new to an enterprise like that has proven beneficial. It is much lower in numbers but we see positive engagement from the participants.

Likewise, we work closely with the policy developments around schemes. Many of the schemes now are increasingly trying to engage farmers. As a component of the schemes are programmes like agri-climate rural environment scheme, ACRES, the beef data and genomics programme, BDGP, the suckler carbon efficiency programme, SCEP, and those types of programmes. At workshops, farmers have the benefits of collective engagement but also from an efficiency of delivery point of view, those opportunities are there as well and we are taking as much advantage of those as we can.

In the long term with the CPD piece, we have an ambition to further develop the way in which a farmer can track or lay claim – whether it is accredited courses but even non-accredited courses – in terms of attendance and participation in these types of activities. We have a programme under development. At the moment, our work is focusing on trying to develop a platform that might enable the tracking of farmer participation and being able to report farmer participation. We are working on a programme that we labelled the “evolve” programme for that as well, which is trying to further develop the engagement of farmers in CPD-related activities.

There are opportunities as well for specific things that are low numbers but very impactful. A good example of that is that for a number of years we have had a specific course. It is relatively small numbers at probably a dozen participants a year. It specifically relates to farm business strategy development. Though it reaches a relatively small number, it is very impactful for farmers who are taking on big farm business enterprises. Regarding the strategy and the business development around that, with big business, high risk is something farmers need support on. We have good engagement on those types of activities as well.