Meet the people behind four Irish businesses setting the bar for sustainable food production

Joe McNamee meets the people behind four Irish businesses setting the bar for sustainable food production.

We are in deep, deep trouble, as a planet, as a species. Climate change is garnering all the headlines but it is not the only issue. Biodiversity, on a global level, has broached critical levels; mass extinctions of habitat and wildlife is an ongoing phenomenon.

Biochemical flows — phosphorous and nitrogen used in industrial agriculture to artificially enrich soil — are at critical levels, causing eutrophication, whereby nutrient-dense chemical runoff from the land into the water system causes algal blooms to develop, food chains to alter and oxygen to deplete, eventually causing ‘dead zones’.