Thank you, acting Presiding Officer. It’s a pleasure to take part in this debate, albeit a little sooner than I thought I was going to be taking part in the debate. I do declare an interest, being a farmer, and just in case I do stray into areas that people might think conflict with my interests, I do put that on the record.

On our farm, in the Vale of Glamorgan, we make great use of satellite imagery and controls of pesticides and fertilisers; nearly all the tractors we use are satellite guided, so when you’re putting the fertiliser out, a certain part of the field, for example, will have a greater dose of fertiliser than the other part of the field, because the imagery is showing that that piece of ground is more fertile than the other. Twenty or 25 years ago, you’d just go into a 10, 15, 20-acre field and you would put a uniform rate across that field, not really knowing whether you were having the impact that you required. And, obviously, there’s the leeching effect that that nitrate and other components of that fertiliser has on the environment. So, there’s an economic benefit back to the business but there is also an environmental benefit back to the business.

We debate much in this Chamber, and very often some of them are the same old problems that we are debating within this Chamber, but by debating this debate today, which as the mover of the motion highlighted—at first you think, ‘What a quirky debate. What are they talking about here?’—actually we can have a huge impact in this area because the land mass of Wales is predominantly agricultural. We have such a varied agricultural industry. We have the arable areas around the coastal regions, we have the livestock sector, and I see the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire is here, which has one of the highest densities of livestock farms anywhere within the United Kingdom. We also have a growing renewables sector making use of our land area, and also the management of flood prevention and environmental gains that can be had. So, really, when you look at the mix of agriculture and the use of agricultural land in Wales, considering the size of Wales, we have a huge spread of opportunity to actually push the boundaries of this new technology, and patent and develop that technology here in Wales.

It was quite appropriate—the intervention that was made by the Member for Ogmore—to point out that we are living in a world with huge population growth, and yet the challenges to the natural resources of this planet have never been as great. You have vast areas of the globe that are turning arid because of water problems and are the source of conflict in many areas. You have the western democracy, shall we say, or the western economies, that historically have provided huge quantities of food through their support of the agricultural industry, but the productivity of the agricultural industry, especially in crop production in particular, really hasn’t moved for the last 20, 25 years. If you look at wheat production, for example, because the genetics of the wheat season have been brought forward, they have not really kept up with the potential and the demand that we need to create to sustain a viable food production base for the ever-growing population of the world.

The motion before us today does put the gauntlet down, in a friendly way, to the Welsh Government, and to our higher education and further education institutions, and the industry itself, to rise to the challenge and the opportunity that actually is there to develop these new growth areas. It’s not just in the production of crops. In livestock production, in particular, big data can make a huge improvement in the profitability and efficiency of the livestock sector, from the genetics that have proven to deliver better livestock animals back to the farm gate, to also the assessment of the meat that comes from those animals when they are processed in the processing plant. In New Zealand, for example, much of the grading work that is undertaken on the carcases of the animals is undertaken electronically now, rather than by the human eye, thus reducing the disparity, shall we say, that very often does happen when the human eye is relied on and the demand that the abattoir might have to what the producer needs, thus providing a consistent level of return back to the primary producer to have the confidence to invest in that livestock sector.

So, this is a really exciting area and we have pockets of real innovation going on in our HE and FE sectors across Wales—Gelli Aur has been talked about; Aberystwyth is another beacon of excellence that we can look at—but we do need to have, as the motion calls for, a plan from the Welsh Government as to how it’s going to harness this research and development moneys, along with the facilities that exist within the research sector in Wales—. I have a limit on my time, but I’ll happily take the intervention.