Mr. Eddie Punch:

I thank the Senator. We have to have more assistance to farmers to cope with all the knowledge they are trying to take in. It is fair to say that farmers have done a lot, but the scientific research is not necessarily as far ahead as it should be. We have to acknowledge that. We have to make sure that farmers are assisted to learn how to manage clover, for example. Clover is for certain a help in reducing the amount of chemical nitrogen purchased but may not be the panacea for excess nitrogen in sandy soils in particular. We have to go back. What I am keen to get across is that farmers are doing an awful lot but they are being asked to do more and more and, sometimes, the help and advice is not fast enough for them.

To be fair to our colleagues in the consultancy sector, consultants are snowed under with work. I have the nitrates handbook that farmers are meant to assimilate. It is 57 pages long. It provides four different slurry and nitrogen spreading dates and four different minimum slurry storage periods for farms, which are perhaps out of date. It provides for new rules that changed from 2022 to 2024 regarding who has to spread by trail shoe or not. We have seen the introduction of banding for cows. Sometimes, farm organisations go along with reducing or changing the rules around banding, for example, because it helps some farmers to get in under the wire in terms of nitrates, but it is adding complexity. The reality is that it is very hard for any individual farmer to digest everything in the nitrates handbook because some of the people who are experts are struggling to keep up with it. The fact is that the experts in consultancy and in Teagasc are snowed under trying to help farmers comply with the ever-changing rules. They are changing every day.

What are we talking about here? It is important, in a public forum, for people to understand that there are now two types of farmers in this country. There is the full-time dairy farmer and large-scale beef or tillage farmer. Those people are snowed under and running faster just to stand still. They are worked to the bone trying to do calving at this time of year and they have all this kind of stuff changing. There is then the part-time farmer who is flat out trying to work an off-farm job while doing on-farm work by night. The more and more we are getting regulation after regulation to try to comply with these demands, the harder it is. I am very concerned that people will burst at some stage and say, "We have had enough of this." We have to look at the fact that the EPA has been very strong on what farmers should do and what they are failing to do, but we see Uisce Éireann getting ten years to sort out the water problems. That still has not got to where it needs to be, even though Uisce Éireann has lots of money and lots of professional staff. Farm families do not have that. They depend on their advisers but those advisers are flat out trying to cope with all this stuff under nitrates.

We then get the lack of fair play for farmers. I mentioned previously at the committee, and I will reference it again, a farmer who got a penalty through a letter dated February 2024 relating to an inspection in 2019 under statutory management requirement, SMR, 1, which is about nitrates. The penalty arose because of the mix between how much cattle ration was fed at grass, how much nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, NPK, was spread, and what the index for that soil was at that farm. Those were three moving parts, which were all complicated and all required an adviser to help. The farmer was treated as badly as to be told nothing for four years but then a penalty was applied in 2023. The trebling of penalties was mentioned. If a farmer is wrong in 2019 but is not told about it in fair time, which, in our view, is pretty much as soon as possible after the event, he or she may well make the same error in 2021, 2022 or 2023. If a farmer is only told about it in 2024, that farmer could have a trebling of penalties. This is what farmers are up against. All we are saying is there has to be fair play and some recognition that if we want farmers to do all this stuff, we either massively increase the support available for Teagasc or else we say we have to slow down with the regulation.