Denis Drennan

And obviously, fertiliser is applied to that grass.

And look, we've done huge work in the last number of years in reducing our dependency on fertiliser with multi-species swarts and incorporating nitrogen-fixing plants like plantain and chicory and clover into swarts.

So we are using way less nitrogen than we were 10 years ago.

But we still need a certain amount, especially tillage farmers, and that needs a certain amount of dairy farmers.

Our competitive advantage is our ability to grow grass in this country, and fertiliser certainly helps in that, albeit at much less levels than we were using in the past.

So we really need to get the fertiliser out in the optimum times, which is springtime.

So this war in Iran could not have happened at a worse time.

It was at peak fertiliser usage for the whole country.

Absolutely.

But the proposals out there from the Commission at the moment are just to bring forward payments like our single farm payment for this year will not be paid to us until about next November.

with a prepayment in November and the balance in December, and they're talking about bringing that maybe forward to October.

So it's like getting your wages a week earlier.

It's not more money, it's just the same amount of money a little bit earlier.

But look, everything would be welcome because there's a huge cash flow issue on farms at the moment because unfortunately, even though the prices in the shops have gone up, the prices to the farmers for both milk and beef have absolutely collapsed in the last couple of months.

So cash flow is a huge issue at farm level at the moment.

Yeah, well, I suppose, look, it's heavy reliant on gas to make fertilizer.

And look, I suppose it's not the cleanest industry in the world making fertilizer.

And we don't have a huge amount of production levels in the EU.

This is probably where our own national policy maybe contradicts a little bit what the EU are saying.

The EU are talking about increasing the amount of calcium mononitrate, which is one form of fertilizer that's going to be made within the EU.