INFORMATION SHEET FOR PARTICIPANTS

Thank you for your interest in our study! We’d like to invite farmers to participate in a research project that aims to map actors and their inter-relationships in Ireland’s dairy sector as it works towards national ambitions for sustainability. Before deciding whether to take part, please take the time to carefully read the information provided below. Feel free to discuss it with family, friends, or anyone else you trust. There’s no rush — ask any questions you have, and don’t feel pressured to make a quick decision. It’s important that you’re fully aware of both the risks and benefits, so you can make an informed choice that is best for you. This process is called ‘Informed Consent.’

What is the study and why is it being done?
Ireland has a reputation around the world for commitment to making food systems more sustainable. Food systems include all the people and activities that bring food from farm to fork, including how we produce, process, transport, distribute, waste and consume food. Worldwide, food systems account for one third of greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation. There are many things we can do to reduce these impacts, and lots of technologies to assist us. One of our greatest assets is our ability towork together across the supply chain to ensure the industry is sustainable for the environment, for the economy, for livelihoods and for quality of life. We believe that working together across the supply chain involves understanding the motivations, values, relationships and feelings of trust and empowerment among groups of people, and this can go a long way towards fixing food systems to make them more sustainable for the environment, economy, society and for human health. The purpose of this study is to explore relationships between groups of people working in different sections of the dairy supply chain as Ireland progresses its sustainability ambitions. Those people include farmers, processors, regulators, advisory services, distributors, retailers, consumers, scientific and international trade researchers. This study will map those relationships.
Who Is Organizing and Funding This Study?
The project is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marine (DAFM). The project has been designed and organised by researchers at the University of Galway. They are Anne Mullen (Principal Investigator; food systems scientist), Noel Doyle (Research Assistant; social scientist), Ayushi Kashyap (Research Assistant; data scientist) and Conor Hayes (Collaborator; computer scientist).

Why Am I Being Asked to Take Part?
There are about 17,000 dairy farms in Ireland, supporting one of the largest indigenous contributors to the economy and producing nutritious food that supports growth and development throughout the life-course. But agriculture contributes over one-third of national greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland and about 40% of those emissions are directly associated with the dairy sector. Farmers are stewards of the land – at the forefront of driving change for environmental, economic and social sustainability. Sustainability policies affect farmers with an immediacy that requires resilience, information, decision-making and support. In this study, we want to explore dairy farmers and dairy farm workers experience of sustainability, the information they receive, how it affects their economic activity, and their relationships with other actors in the supply chain regarding sustainability.

Participation involves completing and submitting an anonymous online survey.

Participation is anonymous – in other words, you are not identifiable at all. Your answers cannot be linked to you. We will, however, ask your age category and occupation category to ensure you are eligible (ie: to ensure you are over 18, and work in dairy farming), and we will also ask your gender as we think it is always important to report and support gender balance in farming research. It will not be possible to identify you from any information you provide.

What Can I Expect If I Agree to Take Part?
After considering this information sheet, should you be willing to participate in our study, we ask you to complete a consent form and the online survey at the link below. The survey, on Survey Monkey, consists of several questions about sustainability in dairy farming, and it takes about 10 minutes to complete. Your responses will be saved only when you press submit. Because the survey is anonymous from the start, once you press submit you cannot withdraw the answers you have provided.

The findings of this survey will be presented to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, and we hope to submit our work for peer review and publication in a scientific journal. In none of these activities will you be identified or identifiable.

Voluntary Participation and The Opportunity to Withdraw Consent
Participation is completely voluntary. You are under no obligation to take part or press submit on a partially or fully completed survey. However, once you press submit we cannot withdraw your data as it is not linked to any identifiers – it is completely anonymous.

What Are the Benefits for Me Taking Part?
By joining this study, you’ll help create information for a new map that shows how different groups of actors within Ireland’s dairy sector connect and interact when it comes to the country’s sustainability ambitions. This map will help researchers explore themes of social networking in sustainable food systems, and will enable policymakers at the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine understand and plan better for implementing measures for environmental, economic and social sustainability. Your participation will contribute to making this map effective and meaningful, supporting Ireland’s implementation of the ambitions expressed in the national Food Vision 2030 strategy. We also hope this map might be useful to researchers and policymakers in other nations as they develop national action plans for sustainable food systems.

What Are the Risks?
We understand that the idea of discussing sustainability in the dairy industry can be stressful, and you may be concerned about the risk of disclosing information about yourself and your farm. Your participation is anonymous, and so we cannot identify you from your responses. Your confidentiality is also protected by the anonymous nature of the survey.

While these risks – anonymity and confidentiality – can be mitigated by the research design, we appreciate that there is potential for distress from participating. We recommend that should you require support or information, you make contact with support services available for dairy farmers from organisations such as Teagasc and the Citizen’s Information Board.

What Do I Need to Know About How the Data Will Be Used and Protected?
All anonymous data will be stored on a password-protected file on the University of Galway cloud server. Only the research team listed here (Anne Mullen, Noel Doyle, Ayushi Kashyap and Conor Hayes) will be authorised to access your data. All data relating to the study will be permanently deleted after 7 years, in line with University of Galway policy.

Your contribution, analysed in aggregate with contributions from all survey respondents, will be used to draw general conclusions about the relationships between groups of people in Ireland’s dairy system as they work together towards implementing ambitious sustainability targets. There will be tensions and there will be synergies (eg: around best industrial practices, emissions targets, fertiliser use, what sustainability means), and we expect to uncover sore spots and sweet spots as we explore the topic among different groups. This might make uncomfortable reading for our industry and our policy makers. However, it is important to have representative voices reported from across the sector – and especially among dairy farmers and farm workers. The research will be presented to the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine as an Evidence Report and a Policy Brief. We expect the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine will present some of the findings internationally, at the UN Food Systems Summit Coordination Hub. We, as academic researchers, will write up our findings as scientific publications.

Where Can I Get Further Information?
For further information contact noel.doyle@universityofgalway.ie. If you wish to contact a neutral third party, email ethics@universityofgalway.ie to communicate.

We hope you will consider this Information Sheet. Please follow this code to find the survey