Ms Karin Dubsky:

They would not do it themselves. I did a quick demo. I have a tube with 100 tests, which is about €70, or you have individually wrapped tests that you can buy in batches of 1,000 and divide between farmers in a catchment. You just open it, dip it into water - I refer to the drinking water in the Gorey area - and then wait for one minute and hold it against the colour chart, which shows you both nitrite, whereby you would be really in trouble if you saw it, and nitrate. Nitrite is very recent, like slurry that has just come in, and nitrate is what we normally find. These are just ranges, so it is not an exact reading, which you would get if you were in the lab. These are Merck tests, which we have used for decades, and what is nice about them is that they also have the limit values. A value of 50 mg per litre is one of the colours, which relates to both the nitrates directive and the drinking water directive, so you know whether you are within or outside the law on that. We use those in coastal inflows and have used them in several of the bays where we have seen very problematic changes in biota, loss of seagrass, loss of other species, and shellfish farmers say there is too much eutrophication. When you give the tool to the farmers, you get it to become a talking point. People just start talking about it and then say, "You cannot just put slurry down a ditch", which also sometimes happens. It has an information, education, awareness and action result. What is also really important is that you look at the ecology in your ditches, streams and so on. Where a farmer sees, for example, sea trout rising or flounders and so on, that feeling of "I have fish here" is absolutely brilliant. You need ecological information first. You also need information on the likes of sewage fungus. It is very simple to identify once you have seen it once. Currently, however, it is not in the farm training and not even in the in-service training which farmers get. It is not included; it should be.