I thank the Minister, and I'm sure you, like me, enjoyed breakfast with the Farmers Union of Wales, which was collecting funds for the DPJ Foundation recently, which does excellent work in mental health.

This increase in input costs over the last few months is adding to a longer term problem facing our farmers. Here's a picture of how the costs have been increasing: back in 1970, you needed to sell around 163 lambs in order to buy a new tractor. By 2020, you would need to sell 864 lambs in order to purchase a new tractor. This naturally means that a number of farmers, particularly the smaller farms that are so common in rural Wales, have to use older machinery and infrastructure that are often no longer fit for purpose.

In addition to this, of course, they are now expected to develop more slurry stores to respond to the new NVZ requirements you placed on them. When the NVZ regulations were introduced in Northern Ireland, the Government there gave £150 million to fund the necessary capital works. To date, only £11.5 million of Welsh RDP money has been spent on capital works in total, and data from NFU Cymru shows that we would still need to spend up to £272 million of RDP funding by the end of 2023.

Minister, do you agree that one possible solution would be to use the RDP funds that remain in order to help farmers to build and improve farm infrastructure, as well as help businesses and contractors in rural areas? This would, therefore, enable investments in new machinery and infrastructure that would increase efficiency, reduce the environmental impact and improve safety by ensuring the viability of the industry.