The Government should encourage people with cash to invest in small farms, farm tourism and small-farm food enterprises, and should deliver tax incentives for doing so, the chief executive of O'Brien's Irish Sandwich Bars, Brody Sweeney, said yesterday.

Addressing the Teagasc national dairy conference in Waterford yesterday, Mr Sweeney said rural communities were being denuded of life as small farms had to amalgamate to make farms viable under current conditions.

He said Ireland was awash with cash that was being invested in many schemes.

"Why shouldn't the government create tax breaks for Dublin investors to invest in small farming enterprises?" Mr Sweeney said.

"I think we should now concentrate on what we used to be good at on small farms. We used to be good at producing food well, and we used to be good at small-scale tourism as well," he told the 700 farmers attending the event.

"In 20 or 30 years time we are going to look back in horror at what we have done or allowed to happen to our small farms, and why we let our communities die like that," he said.

"We should take control of our own interests back from the EU because we have been led by the nose by the EU for far too long."

Mr Sweeney said that, as a passionate supporter of Irish food and founder of a company which buys more than €20 million worth of it each year, there was a great need for innovation in the selling of Irish food.

He said we could not be the lowest cost producers because, no matter how efficient we were, economies of scale in big countries would cause that.

Mr Sweeney said there was a growing band of consumers who wanted organic food and there were major opportunities for farmers in this area.

He said a new brand should be created to market Irish food and tourism which would be licensed by Bord Bia or the Irish Tourist Board.

New Zealand already had such a system.

Mr Sweeney said there was a lot of negativity around farming at present, but he dreamed of the day when farmers talked "about innovative selling methods and not just how to max out on farm subsidies, and where big and large scale is good but small and low scale has a better place".