Mr. Noel Feeney:

The Deputy also mentioned the approximately 30,000 farmers who are not engaged with the public advisory services. Mr. Carroll mentioned, for example, the fertiliser register, which will not only apply to derogation farmers, but to every farmer, including ordinary sheep farmers, suckler farmers and so on. There is a lack of information available to those farmers. We told the nitrates section of the Department recently that both private and public advisory services and the nitrates section need to engage with these farmers. To get farmers to buy into this, all farmers need to be notified because some will ask why we need all this soil sampling and so forth. The Department, and especially the nitrates section, must take a lead on this and we will all fall in behind it because there is a huge amount of misinformation out there regarding the fertiliser database.