60% of the total national broccoli crop in France has been devastated by man made climate change. Our broccoli crop is poor or non-existent; our Irish supplier has no organic broccoli. We cannot buy organic broccoli from any of our suppliers on the continent.
I talk here every week about chemicals in and on our food, but the reality is if we do not stop burning fossil fuels there will not be any food for anybody to spray chemicals on.
Think about that for a minute.
This is happening now. This is the real-life impact of drought and massively intense temperatures across Europe directly impacting our ability to grow food. Our farm is still in moisture deficit.
This is one crop.
I walked our farm today and even though there is a small amount of rain as I write this, we are still in serious moisture deficit. Some of the crops are stunted; yields are down, this is the second time in 8 years that we have experienced serious drought issues here in the west of Ireland.
To one extent or another we have all voted for the food system we have. Granted it has been infinitely facilitated by supermarket retail culture and our increasingly pressurised and busy lives.
But we get what we vote for, and you can see how that has worked out for our American friends across the water. As a society we must decide what we want to reward because in the end that is what we will get. We have always maintained that local organic food production must be where we put our focus, and I have been doing this long enough now to know that growing food commercially is hard and risky and yet outsourcing our food to other countries also comes with a risk.
The real issue here is the fact that when there is a shortage of food due to drought or floods or whatever other climate related shocks, our food systems will be compromised.
There is little doubt that certain countries are much better adapted to growing certain crops and it would be hard to see a viable red pepper industry developing in Ireland, having said that with climate change all of that could be up for discussion. But maybe we could be more self sufficient in carrots or parsnips or cabbage.
When it comes to our food choices we have to decide where it is we want to put our attention. The simple reality is local sustainable food production is our best chance of feeding ourselves when food becomes scarce in other places.
I know that on a 25-acre farm we are not going to feed Ireland. But we are building a network of other growers that share our vision that sustainable agriculture is a real solution to help bring us one step closer to a better more sustainable food secure future.
It is only through your support that we get to do that, and your support makes a difference.
Thank you.
Kenneth