Denis Drennan

Good morning, David.

Well, it seems like a huge amount of money, but I suppose this is where the problem is with the scale and the size and the reach of the EU.

I mean, if you break that down, it's looking like somewhere between 15 and 20 million will come to the Irish part of the EU for that.

And if you break that down further, with 125,000 farmers in the country, a million equates to about 120 euros per farmer, and 20 million equates to about 160 euros per farmer.

So when you start dividing up the loaves and the fishes, it gets very small and very quick

Just because of the scale and size of the EU.

Right.

Yeah, but that's something that would certainly be welcome.

It's very necessary.

But even if you travel it, like, and you go from €160 to, you know, it becomes €480.

If it's not targeted, that's something we would be certainly calling on.

We actually have a meeting with the Minister for Agriculture, Martin Hayden, today, and will be stressing this, that it really needs to be targeted at who has actually bought the fertiliser, because not all those 125,000 farmers in the country would be using vast amounts of fertiliser.

Some would actually, in organic farming, would be using none whatsoever.

But this is where the necessity comes in, that we really need to get funding from the national sector to boost this amount.

And we also need this funding to be targeted, because I suppose to explain to your listeners, David,

The scale of increase in price in fertiliser, the fertiliser that I'm regulated into using is called protected urea.

It's hugely beneficial to the environment as it has zero ammonia emissions.

The price of that fertiliser has gone from about €520 per tonne in January, that when the war kicked off in Ukraine, we're now looking at somewhere around €800 per tonne.

So that's the scale of the increase, and your normal farmer would probably use 10, 20, 30 tonnes of that.

So it's thousands of euros that the farmers have