Mick Kelly

Yeah, exactly.

Like I suppose what's happened over the last 25 years, supermarkets have sort of, they've used vegetables and fruit as kind of last leaders to get you into the store.

So we're all sort of familiar with the like 49 cent kind of carrots or whatever.

And that's so in real terms, the price of veg has stayed more or less stable over 25 years.

It's gone kind of down and then up, but it's,

It's more or less the same cost as they were 25 years ago, whereas the consumer price index has kind of gone like that, obviously.

And most of our other types of foods have increased in price.

So and then their input costs have gone through the roof, energy, oil, fertilizer, all that stuff.

And they're just leaving the sector in their drove a couple of weeks ago, actually.

Carrot grower that had about 12% of the national carrot crop down in Kilkenny went out of business, 45 jobs gone, you know.

So it's just, it's collapsing in front of our eyes.

And unless we do something about it, and obviously government has a role to play, but also us as consumers, then there won't be any veg for us to buy.

Yeah, there's a couple of things.

So obviously those 70-odd growers are kind of the big guys.

They're the guys producing maybe 30-40% of our broccoli and all the major crops.

And they need our support or they'll be gone.

So it's as simple as that.

And like it comes down to, you know, as a consumer, when you go into a supermarket, often you have a choice.

You know, I went, I called into a supermarket on the way over here and there was like there were potatoes on the shelves in the supermarket I was in.

Some of them were Irish and some of them were French, which is mad like that.