'It can be challenging but it is worth it': Meet the growers doing it for themselves

Meet the producers leading the way down a path of true self-sufficiency, shortening supply chains, lowering our carbon footprint and feeding us homegrown produce - from lentils to aubergines

Ultan Walsh; Emma Clutterbuck and Sarah Richards; Tom Fouhy

I’ll never tire of sharing a quote from the late great economist, activist, and philosopher Kenneth E Boulding, who stated, "anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist". 

No one denies the huge economic successes of the agri-biz sector in recent years, but the negative impacts of intensive farming are grave and only worsening: Soil degradation, habitat destruction, loss of biodiversity, which includes the crucial insect population, and water pollution — the 2019 Water Quality in Ireland report, found just 20 Irish rivers in ‘pristine’ condition, down from 500 in the 1980s, blaming agriculture and land management practices as the key culprits.

What about the primary producers, the farmers? While fertiliser, pesticide, and processing industries boom on the back of farming, farm debt spirals ever upwards and too many farmers work for below cost.

What’s more, we struggle with food security and resilience — that is, the ability to feed ourselves should outside events such as natural disasters (eg Covid-19) or geopolitical events (eg Brexit, Russia-Ukraine) interrupt supply chains.

The country marketed abroad by Bord Bia as The Food Island, uniquely positioned with one of the most temperate growing climates in the world, imports far more too much food we could produce ourselves, including most fruit and vegetables, even apples and potatoes.

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB

Finally, if you’re part of a dwindling flock of dodos still denying the existential and catastrophic threat of climate change, then the bould Kenneth would most definitely define you as ‘mad’ — yet there is a drive to double a dairy herd we’ve struggled to feed in recent years because of deluge and drought.

Even that lumbering bureaucratic behemoth, the EU, recognises the challenge, setting a goal to convert 25% of European agricultural farmland to organic by 2030, with European Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans recently warning, "If we get [the EU’s Green Deal] wrong, our children will be fighting wars over water and over food". 

Apologies if your cornflakes are now submerged in tears, for there is potentially an upside — one of the great joys of humanity is the eternal possibility of an upside — though it requires a sea change in Irish agriculture.

We need a farming system working with the environment, not against it. We need a farming system primarily charged with feeding the Irish people and adequately rewarding farmers for their work above the wishes of privileged vested interests. We need a food system that doesn’t contribute to global food waste, 1.3 billion tonnes each year — approximately the same number of people go hungry every day. 

Irish households and businesses waste a million tons of food annually, two and a half Croke Parks, filled to the brim.

In other words, we need to wind back several decades to an era before farming became intensively industrialised, but this time, incorporating modern innovation and technical know-how to create a truly progressive and productive 21st-century agriculture.

The farmers below freely admit they won’t feed Ireland, let alone the world. Rather, they are pathfinders, exploring new routes towards a genuinely sustainable food system, hopeful that others will follow.

Then, if all the superb Irish conventional farmers adopted, and adapted to, more enlightened practices, we really could begin to feed Ireland and a fair share of the world beyond.

TOM FOUHY 

Tom Fouhy

One of my most favourite of all ingredients is Puy lentils (lentilles vertes du Puy) imported from Le Puy in France — grey-green lentils whose innocuous appearance belies their delicious flavour and extraordinary nutritional value.

Last November, I received a small sack of them and have been eking them out ever since but what makes this horde so precious is that they were grown in North Cork, by Tom Fouhy on his 84-acre organic tillage farm in Castletownroche.

Tom produces standard grain crops, including milling wheat and oats, but his specialty crops list is inspirational: Lupins, a native European plant with huge potential as protein-rich food for animals and humans; brown and golden linseed; heritage grains including emmer, einkorn and buckwheat; fava (broad) beans; sunflowers, and lentils. And last month, he planted chickpeas. 

Tom converted to organic farming almost ten years ago, tentative early steps gradually becoming leaps and bounds, recently graduating with an MSc in organic farming.

“I found the big farmers were getting bigger,” says Tom, “and it was getting harder and harder to make a living and I was going through the possibilities. We always had an interest in food and nature but never seemed to get a chance to nurture that when an ag adviser asked me, ‘did you ever think of going organic?’ Sometimes you need to hear something from someone else. It was a lightbulb moment. The interest in organic was always there — I just needed the code to access it.

“Organic is not just about what you grow, it is about fairness, being a fair person to your planet and all the people on it. It would be so much better if we could even half live by that principle. Organic food is not dear — non-organic food is too cheap. The farmer is the bottom of the food chain. Look at the industry built around him. I’m no ranting agro-warrior — it’s just a basic fact.” 

Tom’s initial lentil trials were conducted in secret.

“I remember going on holidays with the kids in the car to France and having a simple salad, leaves, dressing, lentils and it was delicious. It is the lowest-yielding of all the lentils, but they are as good as meat in terms of minerals and iron. I started four years ago with the expectation I’d fail, small trial amounts intercropped with other crops because I didn’t want other people to know what I was doing because they’d be, you know, ‘God love him!’ 

“They are not easy to grow, hopeless against weeds, I have to weed-surf them religiously every weekend and our climate can make them indeterminate. It costs me thousands if it doesn’t work. To grow pulses, you have to be a bit of a horticulturalist and a bit of a cereal farmer. it is such a steep learning curve and you must stay with it.

“I’d like to eventually sell pulses and ancient grains to the public through an on-farm shop and an online shop, giving people access to a tremendous product and a chance to buy it locally, to have that provenance, to learn you can actually grow those things here.

“There is no Irish research on growing pulses and I am trying to see what is achievable. Academic trials are usually on tiny plots but when you transfer to field scale, it gives you warts and all, the results are so different. This is the only way you’ll see what will work.

“I can’t do it all on my own. There have to be others growing as well and I’m happy to offer knowledge and a route to market as well. Deep down, this has to happen. If you can get groups of farmers to scale this up, co-operative style or even bigger, it becomes a viable enterprise. And you have to have a love of food and a respect for what it can give to mankind and human beings if you go down this route.” 

ULTAN WALSH 

Ultan Walsh

Almost two decades ago, zoologist turned horticulturalist Ultan Walsh was told he couldn’t grow aubergines in Ireland. That season he grew ten different varieties. Then again, Ultan and Lucy Stewart’s Gort na Nain farm is pretty special. Not for nothing was it awarded Collaboration of the Year for their partnership with Cafe Paradiso restaurant in Cork at the inaugural World Restaurant Awards in 2019.

“I need to be doing veg that is more challenging, less common, to be intellectually stimulated,” says Ultan. “I need to be experimenting. When I first grew the aubergines, a chef visited and asked, what’s that, what would I do with it?

“With my particular model, I am trying to offer produce that commands a premium regardless of the way I grow it, even though I grow organically and am very proud of that. My asparagus is the best example: Customers are going to buy it and many wouldn’t know or care whether it is organic. All they really want is a premium, local product that is fresh — flown in from Peru is never going to be ‘fresh’.

“Our model will never feed the world but we are topping up and adding flavour to your basic staples, rice, potatoes, plant-based protein or meat, if you eat it. Pragmatically, there are certain areas of the globe that are really good for growing bulk crops such as wheat or soybeans and I’d support continuing in that vein, because remaining habitats, pristine land,  and rainforest is being encroached upon to produce these crops or crops like palm oil, for industrial use. For now, it is a better use of these prairies to supply basic crops — but to feed humans, not animals.

“Globally, even just 150 years ago, meat was rarely eaten, and now we consider it a daily necessity — that is not sustainable. Also, the majority of produce from these prairies, soybeans, wheat, is going into animal feed — that is not sustainable.

“I don’t like the idea of a siege mentality, of closing off from the world. We are interconnected with every other country in Europe. I want to have olive oil and coffee. I think it is very important that we think of sustainability in European and even global terms and enhance those connections.

“I know farmers going down an organic route not because they are environmentalists but for the cost savings, once you stop paying out for herbicides, fungicides, fertilisers, even the diesel costs for spraying.

“‘Conventional farming’ is only an idea of the last 50 or 60 years — before that, we put nothing on the land that wasn’t natural. Once you remove these added costs and the cost of environmental damage, your yields may not increase, but they will be comparable depending on your treatment of the land and profits will definitely increase — it’s a no-brainer.”

EMMA CLUTTERBUCK AND SARAH RICHARDS 

Emma Clutterbuck and Sarah Richards

Like so many others, lockdown turned my occasional bread-baking into weekly practice, and it seemed entirely natural to begin experimenting with Irish specialty grains and flours, particularly the recent flourishing of heritage or ‘ancient’ grains.

The difference in flavour and quality is quite extraordinary but I was merely following a well-worn path established by Ireland’s community of real bread bakers, chief among them Sarah Richards and her wonderful Tramore-based Seagull Bakery.

Sarah has always sought to work with Irish-grown grains, and is especially keen on Emma Clutterbuck’s spelt flour, which Emma grows with her partner, tillage farmer Pat Foley, and which they mill in their Oak Forest Mills, in Piltown, Co Kilkenny.

“[Pat] and I wanted to try something different,” says Emma, “and had been very interested in heritage grains, particularly spelt. We’d also been concerned by the constant refrain that it was impossible to grow milling-standard wheat here which was not the case at all. Teagasc reports show we were growing good quality wheat into the mid-'80s, but it became cheaper to import flour from the UK mills.

“Before we ever got really into it, we went out to talk to people and ran into Sarah and she was so positive about what we were proposing to do. We quickly found out the artisan bakers had a real interest in what we were doing. Larger industrial-scale bakers weren’t sure what to make of us, trying to be supportive but only really interested in large volumes.” 

Emma and Pat’s own artisan mill, using stone mills imported from Austria, gives them greater flexibility to mill at the optimum time and provides an intimate knowledge of their flours.

“I had a bit of playing around with it at first,” says Sarah, “but once I figured it out, that it required minimal handling and endless water, it’s amazing.” Sarah began baking in her kitchen, graduating to a log cabin in her garden, eventually opening Seagull Bakery in Tramore, in 2016. Mere weeks ago, she and her husband Conor opened a second outlet in Waterford City, and now employ 18 people, with eight bakers including Sarah.

“It is possible to create a sustainable business,” says Sarah, “100% possible, oh God yeah. It is really viable for one or two people to have a bakery and sell in a small rural area and support a family.” 

While Oak Forest Mills would struggle to supply the industrial sector, working with Seagull enables a sustainable route from field to table.

“We will never do anything but sourdough breads,” says Sarah, “and always use organic flours but too many times we were getting flours from France of varying quality and, with no communication with the grower or the miller, never knew what to expect. Hydration might be radically different from batch to batch, and you could lose a whole bake.

“But Emma can tell you about a particular flour and what to expect from it. Sure, you can get flours, even organic flours, that are standardised to achieve consistency but I find they are lacking in flavour, they are more like industrial bread, fluffy and pappy." 

Emma says: “On a broader level, for food security, it is better to have more people involved in growing, including in this country.  "You could have massive floods in Europe, completely wiping out a crop and then you’re trying to source from elsewhere. Globally we are very close to the wire in terms of grain stocks.” 

Sarah adds: “Seeking out individual suppliers isn’t the easiest route, but I get huge joy out of it. It can be challenging but it is worth it because you are part of and helping to create a local circular food economy.”