How can we work with local farmers to create a sustainable future in Ireland?

“The new technologies and ways of using them unraveled our farm like someone pulling at a loose thread on an old jumper”- James Rebanks, English Pastoral

Our shetlands eating treehay in the snow.

James Rebanks tells a story about his grandfather. They are tilling in a hawthorn fringed field. James, the boy and his grandfather. The tractor makes a pass. Grandfather stops. Scoops something from the field. Puts it in his cloth cap and places the cap in his lap. The boy peeks in. Speckled eggs. Curlew. They are in this field, curlews. Have always been. They make a second pass. The grandfather steps down from the seat, scoops out a scrape of a nest in the tilled land with the back of his hand. Lays the eggs down. They look back. Mother has resettled on the nest. The grandfather smiles. Curlews have always been in this field. They still are.

The grandfather is from another time. A time of untidy farms, grinding work, hand tools and laid hedges, farms that worked a village of people. Farms loud with people and the wild things they lived with. He is not perfect. But he is better than what is to come. Rebanks book, English Pastoral is an elegy for that other time, a lament for what replaced it, and a possibility for how we can reorganize our farming, communities and cultures to recover from the damage of that change, from traditional to factory farming, and meet the challenges climate, environmental and biodiversity crises are facing us with.

Gathering willow to feed the flock

Farmers are at these crisis points hand in hand with the people we grow food for. The choices consumers make at the end of their forks shape the farming and farmers that produce their food. We are in crisis because economics, consumer choice, science and farming have cooperated on a factory food model to provide cheap plentiful food where productivity is the ultimate metric. The law of the fork. Produce plentifully, cheaply, unseasonably, constantly, to order and uniformly. Or get out of farming.

Homemade beehive in our alder copse

One consequence of those choices and the farming model forged from them is that people have both lost trust in and connection to their food, and the farmers who raise and grow it. People have seen industrial farming shape the climate and landscape for the worse. They have seen less how it has shaped farms, farmers, communities and culture, also, to their detriment. Have seen even less, perhaps, how the demand for cheap food has driven that change. The more factory farmers became, the more they became feared, and the less power they had over their own model of production. The cheaper the food became, the higher the price extracted from the land in growing it. And the less choice many farmers felt they had to an alternative method of production. Farms collaborated in their own destruction. The destruction of cultures, farms, the land they once were custodians of. And now, obviously, we are in sore need of change.

Farmers can choose to lead change. Or be led to it. But if we are led to change it will be by people, environmentalists, ecologists, activists and politicians, who increasingly often see farming ways of life, culture, communities and values as obsolete, outdated and irrelevant. Who have learned to distrust us. Farmers can be relevant, must be relevant, or they can be seen as obsolete.

Spotted orchid from our front field meadow

Obsolescence is not kind to the obsolete. Farmers fear it. Because they know what it looks like. How it carves up communities and cultures. Weavers. Newspaper print setters. The American rust belt. The obsolete disappear from history. Whole classes of people whose power and independence slipped through their fingers and who watched helplessly as economics dismantled their viability. If the law of the fork has taught farmers one thing it is this. Be useful. Or be done. Or. As farmers are repeatedly told. Get big. Or get out. The mantra of modern farming.

The farm, the farmer, the land and the livestock are often units of production, with a price but no value. The relationship between farmer, land, livestock, community and ecology stripped of any good it might have in the name of cheapness and efficiency. It is also, increasingly, a vocation fewer and fewer can make ends meet with. The average Irish beef farmer earns about 9000 yearly from their farm. 

There is a thirst amongst many farmers for a better way. A return to the values that once were perhaps more prominent. Custodianship, frugality, connection and community, with modern understanding of landscape, ecology and farming methods underpinning them.  For farms that sound like their grandparents farms. Loud with the noise of wild things. With wild spaces. There are regenerative farming groups. Farmer run wildlife schemes. A desire to be connected with consumers. To have farming and rural lives, values, work, ideas and experiences understood, seen and valued. To reclaim a better way to farm, a better way to feed our families and yours. There is a hunger to work hand in hand with those with expertise, and marry our knowledge to ecological know how and produce a landscape and a farming we can be proud of. The drive to custodianship, to pride in the natural world that inhabits our farms is still strong.

Our bluebell meadow and woods in spring

I read George Monbiot recently (a British writer known for his environmental and political activism), celebrating the end of farming. Looking forward to a world where farmers no longer are. Farm produce replaced by industrial mass scale processes of chemical fabrication, factory production and industrial fermentation. Many of the same forces - science, chemistry, profit and economic efficiency - that drove us to our current crisis. The end of a way of life, of food and family cultures, of communities. An ecologist welcoming the replacement of small family businesses with large scale industrial processes and factories. The land I work, the children I raise on it, the legacy I tend, the community I am becoming part of. It’s end is celebrated. It is hard not to see George as a mill owner happy to be rid of his Luddites. No matter what it costs them. Women and men, like me, hoping for an honest wage for their work. Fearful of what obsolescence will bring for them. It is hard not to see George, and many others, as comparatively wealthy people, telling comparatively poor people like me, what we must give up so that a wealthy way of life can be preserved.  

My farm is small. And I am new to farming. Not yet ten years. I raise sheep and goats. Pigs occasionally. Turkeys and geese. This year honeybees, and fruit bushes. A pair of buzzards hunt my farm. Sparrowhawks too. Badgers dig for slug eggs on my hill field. Deer sleep in the quarry field and eat my roses. I hear the vixen as I lamb. There are dragonflies and swallows. The wuthering snipe calls for his mate as my goats kid at three am. A raven tumbles through the air chased by a murder of crows.The pine marten eyes me curiously from a perch on the stone wall. Red squirrels flit across my copses of alder. Butterflies are in my fields, feasting on Broom, Spotted Orchids, Herb Robert. The Bluebell meadow is loud with bees. The Hawthorns throng with insects in the spring. They ivy towers throng with them in the November flowering.The wild mint scents the air when I mow for my fence lines. This year I will put up bat boxes for the bats that already hunt my insect rich fields. Maybe a barn owl box too. Hedges. Agroforestry trees.

I am not so different from you. I feed your family as a way to feed my own. I fear for both their futures. There are farmers looking to lead a change. More will follow if we can find that common ground to collaborate on. We are not the enemy. We are hand in hand already. Inextricably linked. Where we go is our decision. If farmers are to learn from the past and progress into the future we need your help. Your understanding. Your support. Which we, in turn, need to be equal to. Where once economic need and advantage created a dysfunctional relationship that pushed us all to our common crises, ecological expertise, economic equality and sheer environmental necessity can create a meaningful opportunity for a healthy, harmonious responsibility driven farming practice.

The factory model is both our problems. Evolving from it is both our futures. And we cannot do it without each other.

My name is Keith Brennan

I blog about farming and nature over at Hawthornhillfarm.com. I’m @HawHillFarm on Twitter and Hawthornhillfarm on Instagram.

The back field wildflower meadow