Taste the nation: How a Cork couple hatched a plan to deliver local produce to people's doors
Michael and Carmel O'Sullivan of Farmsy.ie
Husband and wife Michael and Carmen O’Sullivan are passionate about growing their own food and eating as locally as possible. A number of years ago, they began keeping hens, doling out any eggs that they couldn’t use to friends and family.
“You know yourself,” says Michael. “Once you’ve tried an egg from your own hens you don’t want to eat any other kind ever again.” “Back then, we had three chickens and a cockerel - Henrietta, Mags, Mrs Brown and Willy,” explains Carmen.
“All we wanted were a few fresh free-range eggs, and to enjoy watching the birds fuss around the place. Straight away, neighbours and friends were interested in our eggs so we soon increased the flock and started selling eggs from an honesty box outside our cottage.” After a while, Michael – who works for Cork County Council – began delivering eggs around Kinsale on his way home in the evening. It was a roaring success, earning Michael the nickname of The Egg Man.
Then, the pandemic happened, and with restrictions on movement preventing people from getting to their local suppliers, the couple found themselves inundated with requests from their customers about where to purchase fruit and vegetables.
Knowing that they lived in a locality ripe with producers, Carmen and Michael set to work, creating Farmsy.ie, an online shop specialising in top grade locally grown and produced products. With tech know-how on their side thanks to Carmen’s background as a website consultant, they got their online shop up and running quickly, starting with a small collection of producers and gradually expanding their offering.
“We were familiar with the concept of veg boxes and, of course, delivery was the way everything was going from the start of the pandemic, so we wanted to hone in on what we that were the best products from the area,” explains Carmen.
The couple hail from Bandon, with family from the surrounding area. Carmen’s grandparents met at a dance in Garrettstown, he working at the Garrettstown Estate and she at the Blue Horizon. Keeping it local enough, they live in a cottage just outside Timoleague, and source the produce for Farmsy.ie from the surrounding area, stretching out towards Clonakilty and back beyond Kinsale.
The mission of Farmsy.ie is to provide chemically-free local food that is organically grown. While in the beginning, they sold produce from Food for Humans, Horizon Farm Kinsale, West Cork Coffee and Twomey Farms Ballinhassig, today that range has expanded to include organic meat and fish, Arbutus Bread and an intriguing complement of organic stocks and condiments.
The couple is extremely committed to a business that is ethical and sustainable.
“The fact that we are able to get local produce into people’s homes who might not ordinarily be able to make it to a midweek farmer’s market because they are at work, is cutting down on food miles and putting good food on their table,” says Carmen.
The recent report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights that human-caused climate change, which has pushed up global temperatures by 1.1C, is driving weather and climate extremes in every region across the world.
“There is no denying the growing environmental disasters that are impacting all of us: climate change, plastic pollution, our dying oceans, animal extinction, reduction in habitat and biodiversity, pandemics,” says Carmel. “We are cognizant of these critical issues in everything we do and strive to have a positive impact in our local community and on our local environment.” The couple hopes that by adopting a stringent selection process when it comes to the producers that they showcase on Farmsy.ie, they are contributing in a positive way to our environmental situation.
“At its core, we believe that by supporting local we can make a difference,” she says. “Our local food producers are producing food of a higher quality which supports health. Increasingly they are being supported in choosing regenerative farming practices and sustainable methods of food production. We are helping to reduce food miles and are making it easier for people to access nutrient-dense, health-promoting, local food. Consumers are asking for change and for the better. We are all supporting and facilitating change through our considered consumer behaviours.”
In purchasing produce from Michael and Carmel, we are buying into a way of life. Whether it’s your way of getting closer to a life where you too can have chickens with names like Henrietta or Mrs Brown, or you want to put food on your table that you know has been produced in the most sustainable way possible, a business like Carmen and Michael O’Sullivan’s one shows that there is an appetite for local, sustainably produced food, we just need new vehicles to provide it to us.
Their customer base is as varied as the products they sell, ranging from mothers incorporating an order into their weekly shop, to busy people who are working from home and find the convenience of the service unmatched.
For Michael O’Sullivan, it doesn’t matter who the customer is, he just loves delivering food to them. “I feel like I am part of their week now, and that feels good, I have to say.”
For more information see www.farmsy.ie
