Disaster is never far away…

by Kenneth Keavey

It’s been another crazy week. We have so much good stuff happening on the farm. We received the first Irish organic cherries from Darragh Donnelly and they are fantastic.  We have been busy harvesting our own fresh garlic, and we have plenty more for next week, along with gorgeous lettuce, and tonnes other amazing freshly harvested farm and Irish produce, such as salad, spinach, chard and more.

Then there has been the climate fuelled heatwave that we couldn’t quite believe, one minute there was a biting North wind, it was pouring rain, 6-7C and the next it was 30C! and not a single cloud in the sky.  The intensity certainly gives us a taste of what a fossil fuel warmed planet is going to look like. This type of intense heat is going to stress already stretched food systems and mean our reliance on imported foods must shift.

Nevertheless, the dry soil meant conditions for sowing parsnips and carrots beetroot and spinach were ideal, but as with all thing’s that seem to be going well, disaster is always lurking its ugly head just around the corner and sure enough our fancy seeding machine took a turn for the worse. luckily Enda’s ingenuity meant the day was saved and in a MacGyver-esk type intervention we got the machine going again.

We have also sowed an amazing 3 acres or sow of a mix of loads of different clovers and wildflowers which will be a mecca for biodiversity.

Now I don’t know if it is the amazing compost we used in our tunnels this year, but the crops look amazingly healthy. We will be harvesting our first new season farm kale next week and it looks terrific. Not only that but because it was spent organic mushroom compost, we are getting free mushrooms popping up here and there!

But here’s a question for you. Would you prefer caterpillars or chemicals on your kale?

Kale in the US came in as the second most sprayed crop in the EWG dirty dozen list in 2026. How can this super resilient crop need such an array of toxic chemicals to apparently keep it growing? I find this hard to fathom? I write this sitting in our Polytunnel full of the most amazing kale and all it has seen is fertile soil and water, there isn’t an aphid or caterpillar in sight, and that’s no different for the thousands of kale plants we have in the ground in the field, the biggest issue we have there is the pesky pigeons.

Ironically if you did ever find a little critter of some denomination or another in your produce this is a great sign, because it certainly means the absence of chemicals. Now no chemicals on our food are pleasant but I am sorry to say for your US followers that you get a much worse deal when it comes to chemicals on your food compared to here in Ireland. Having said all that the Irish dept of agriculture survey here in Ireland shows that in 2021 nearly 70% of the kale grown was treated with a variety of herbicides and pesticides.

So, the question remains caterpillars or chemicals, which would you choose?

As always thanks for your support each order is changing the food system one box at a time.

Kenneth

 Local garlic, honest feedback, plus a fantastic offer

by Kenneth Keavey

We planted our garlic bulbs back in November and we have just started harvesting our very first fresh garlic bulbs with stems. They are beautiful, Emmanuel and his team, Enda and Daire, are harvesting it with such care, it is a true celebration of local food.

It is a seasonal star and will not be round for long, we have one full tunnel of it, we don’t grow garlic on a commercial scale, we simply could not afford to compete with the cheap supermarket fodder, garlic is seen as a cheap commodity crop.

Much of the garlic on supermarket shelves is from China. The reason we have Chinese garlic and so much of it, nearly 1 million kgs, or one third of all the garlic eaten in Ireland is Chinese, is about price and supply, it is cheap. There is very little Irish garlic production with a couple of notable exceptions such as Drummond House garlic and Taylors of Lusk, but how can locally grown garlic compete with this scale of cheap imports?

Our fresh garlic is about as far from the cheap imported Chinese garlic as you can get.  I love our garlic, it is delicate gorgeous and you can use the whole stem. It goes without saying that no herbicides or pesticides have come near it!  But it is more than that, here is a crop that can really reconnect us with our food.

So, it hurt a little the last week when as I was dealing with another electricity outage on our farm, getting the tractor generator out (Thanks ESB that is about three outages in as many weeks) when a customer left our farm shop saying they would come back in the summer when we had more of our own stuff. (What about the kale, spinach, chard, garlic, red cabbage, rocket, lettuce, salad, mushrooms and potatoes).

They then sent a follow up e-mail complaining about our pricing. I absolutely agree we are not cheaper than the supermarkets how could we be? They can sell organic carrots for less than what we pay to buy them, not sure how they do this? I get it though, there is a cost of living crisis and food is a hard sell, when it is so cheap, but at the same time we can find it easy to buy that coffee for nearly €6, I do it too. It is supermarket conditioning we have just come to accept. 

We love all feedback here and to be fair Darragh and Eddie in customer service get loads and they field it really well. This piece of feedback was no exception, and it reminded me of how hard the business of growing food is and how we just cannot compete on price with supermarkets. Nevertheless, some days it is easier to hear negative comments than other days, and head in hands, on this day, this left me feeling demoralised and upset. It is tough growing vegetables, and we have been mostly succeeding or at least persisting at it now for 20 years.

On the very same day (And the irony here is not lost on me) in Tesco, a man came up to me out of the blue, and said “you are Green Earth Organics, I love what you do, it’s so important, keep doing it” you couldn’t actually write it, and as I said to him, “thank you so much your timing could not have been better.”

Sometimes all it takes is a little comment to snap us out of things, it reminded me that we have a fantastic amazing loyal customer base and you support us the best you can, some every week, some whenever you can, so thank you! I know it’s tough, I know there is a cost-of-living crisis, I know we are not the cheapest, I know you could go down and get stuff cheaper in a supermarket, but you choose to support us instead, and quite frankly that is amazing, so thank you.

So, thank you for seeing past the prices and thank you for your support.

Kenneth

PS I remember having a conversation with Fergus Halpin who runs Abercorn farm and used to run Harvest Day, we were lamenting good weather, I know it doesn’t make sense does it? We love good weather, we need the good weather for the farm, but good weather means our orders drop off, and good weather coupled with a bank holiday can be devastating!

The little ironies of life, anyway as we are promised good weather and as we are coming into a week leading into a bank holiday please do not forget to support us and we have a very special treat for those of you who spend over €80, enter code CAKE80 to get one of these very special amazing cakes (they are free from lactose, refined sugar, and gluten, but they taste amazing they really do, you would never know the difference, try one and see for yourself). We have been working with Rose and Vanilla for the last three months to get this over the line and finally we are there.

Fake Farms and Farm News

by Kenneth Keavey

It’s been a wonderful week on the farm; the soil is dry and that makes planning and getting things done so much easier. Planning around the weather makes growing 20 crops on a commercial scale tricky.

So, to get the last few weeks of dry weather has been a Godsend. Now mind you it has been cold, the wind has been biting, but I am informed that this may be changing towards the end of next week.

Either way we have been making the very most of the conditions. We have planted and sown loads of crops and although growth has been slow, the plants are at least in the ground. We are a little behind, but I feel more confident now that I did two weeks ago for the season ahead.

Cameron our potato grower has informed us we will be coming to the end of his Irish potatoes in the next couple of weeks, he grows all our Irish potatoes, and we have had a great relationship with him for a number of years now.

Richard from Clashganny organic farm has also sent us his last pallet of Irish organic apples, we have buying Irish apples off Richard for maybe nearly 10 years now.

Joe Kelly has cucumbers planted for us, and we are getting salad, and spinach and chard from him most weeks, we will take most of what he has for us throughout the season.

Beechlawn Organic Farm have been supplying us organic produce since we started nearly 20 years ago, and it is amazing to have a resource such as them down the road, they have been true leaders in the Irish organic production over the last 25 years.

Millhouse Farm produce the very best rocket, salad and parsley, and we have been getting produce from them too for a number of years. This is a just a sample of some of our real Irish farmer partners. There will always be discussion around quality and a bit of back and forth, it is fresh produce after all, but we will always make it work.

These are real farms with real names as is our farm. Of course, we import and buy in produce and deal with other amazing suppliers and growers and co-ops in Europe too.

But what we do not do, is create marketing brands that have names that give the impression that they are actual farms. Names that give customers the impression that the produce comes from a real family farm that does not exist, for example the name “Farrells” from one well known discount supermarket. This is NOT a real farm!

The facts are clear, the number of veg growers in Ireland has contracted from over 600 to just over 60 in the last 20 years, the pricing power of supermarkets has had a heavy hand in this.  Primary produce is always the first in the firing line when it comes to discounts and has often and is still used today as a loss leader to lure consumers into large supermarket stores.

You cannot argue with making food more affordable and cheaper, but I would argue there are few industries that are forced to accept a price less than the cost of production, it is not right.

This too is a story of the powerful and the powerless. When any large retail organisation has massive market share it can put undue pressure on small suppliers who in truth have little option but to comply. Thankfully the scales are moving at least a little in the right direction, and it seems the crisis in the Irish veg growing sector maybe the last straw that is at last offering a little protection to Irish producers.

As always, your support is helping move us towards a fairer food system.

Thank you.

Kenneth

PS We may need to get a bigger marquee it seems, the tickets for our sustainability festival on the 12th of Sept are selling out fast, and as the first press releases are going out now we would very much like to make sure you our customers get first refusal, so please have a think if this is something you would like to attend and get your tickets soon. 

A huge Announcement

by Kenneth Keavey

Even after 20 years in business, no two days are ever the same and we keep on experiencing new things for the first time, new challenges, but also new opportunities. 

I have been bursting at the seems trying to contain my excitement at this announcement, which truly is a first for us. Something we have been working very hard on over the last 2 months and finally we can tell you about it, and the scale of this event is a first for us.

We are having our very first sustainability festival on the 12th Sept this year.  

We have an amazing selection of speakers, demos, suppliers, tastings, farmers, growers, beekeepers, music, speakers, speciality food trucks, artisan ice creams, and sustainable coffee, and of course farm tours planned, it will be a day to celebrate the diversity of Irish local food (from a vegetable perspective!) and the importance now more than ever of using the power of our food choices to drive change that impacts our health and the health of this planet in a positive way.

You can get your tickets here, there are a limited number of early bird tickets available, and then the full price tickets are €40, and these will be strictly limited too.

Generally, we have never charged (or charged a nominal fee) for our annual events on the farm, but we soon discovered that just to attempt to cover the costs of an event of this magnitude we needed to charge €40 per ticket just to aim to break even. If there is anything left over from the sales after costs are deducted the proceeds will be donated to our two chosen charities “Hometree” and “Friends of the Earth Ireland” both of whom will be speaking at the event. 

We are also charging for children’s tickets, this is something we would not normally ever do, but we have limited capacity in our speakers tent and so we feel we had to limit the numbers somehow. The entirety of children’s ticket fees will also be donated to our two charity partners.

We have always felt strongly that educating and inspiring children through connecting them with nature (and our two pet rescue pigs, George and Florence of course) is a very important part of our journey and we thought very hard about how we could make up to you as parents for having to charge. So, we have decided to put on an extra annual farm walk/tour this year, we will be running this on the 18th of July and there will only be a nominal charge (€10/car) to reserve your place. Tickets for this event will go on sale soon too so keep your eyes peeled, and we will let you our customers know first.

I always need to pinch myself to make sure it is real; that in fact we have made it to this pivotal milestone. It is hard to think that when myself my dad and my wife Jenny started packing our first veg boxes on pallets and empty Guiness kegs 20 years ago that we would be still here 20 years later. 

I think we are here too against all the odds, and there were plenty of times when I seriously considered throwing in the towel, it has been and continues to be a tough journey. I know some of you our customers have been with us right from the start, and that is something that makes me feel very emotional you are the reason that we are still here, and the reason when times were tough, we didn’t quit.

Now more than ever it is vital that businesses such as ours exist and thrive and grow. Our world is crying out for compassion, fairness, support, inclusion, sustainability, healthy food and somebody to standup for the health of our planet. You are that person, and you are facilitating us in helping deliver that message. 

So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for keeping us growing (in every way).

Kenneth

PS In another first we have just launched a brand-new delivery day, we can now deliver to you on Mondays. This delivery day is much more difficult to achieve operationally, and the cost of delivery will be at the higher charge of €8/delivery. This is here to facilitate times when you need an additional delivery or an early delivery, we would ask that you stick to your normal delivery day and only use this facility if you really need to. In order to be offered this choice you will need to place your order as a guest rather than using your registered account.  

Wait, I guarantee you will want to read this…

by Kenneth Keavey

Ok so a long one this week, but bear with me I guarantee you will want to read this.

We have been blessed, the last two weeks of fine weather have made an enormous impact on our farm work. We are nearly back ontrack, after months of waiting we are back in business. Onions are being planted, outdoor celery is going into the ground today, the first outdoor brassica planting which is only 2 weeks late (not ideal but better than it could have been) also.

The tomatoes are doing incredibly well, and I am quietly confident that we may have our best crop of tomatoes ever this year, they are already flowering, watch this space. We will start harvesting our own farm garlic next week, and we are still bringing in kale, along with tonnes of other Irish produce, from Beechlawn, Joe Kelly, Millhouse farm and many more.

All great stuff, we also have been eternally grateful for the last couple of pallets of Irish apples, well done Richard Galvin from Clashganny farm county Waterford.

In addition to these wonderful apples, we have the very best fruit, and it was on this point I wanted to dwell a little this week. (The next time you are in any supermarket take a look at the packaged Citrus fruits, oranges, lemons, clementines, limes grapefruit, look at the label closely, look at the small print, do it, don’t wait, go to a supermarket website, check it out, much better to see it with your own eyes, or if you want to see some video footage check out my Instagram video this week.)

During the week I was in a supermarket, and I had a look at what looked like an upmarket pack of oranges, here is what was on theses ultra-shiny oranges:

The waxes:

 E903 – Carnauba Wax: Derived from a Brazilian palm tree. The most natural of the three, also used in car polish and cosmetics. Considered low risk, but still an industrial coating on our food.

 E904 – Shellac: A resin secreted by lac insects. Not vegan. Also used to coat pharmaceutical tablets.

 E914 – Oxidised Polyethylene Wax: A synthetic, petroleum-derived plastic wax. Approved by regulators, but this is a product of the petrochemical industry being applied to the skin of your fruit.The fungicides (mixed into the wax and applied post-harvest):

 Pyrimethanil: Independent peer-reviewed research has identified endocrine-disrupting effects, a 2024 toxicology review flagged it as a persistent environmental pollutant and is investigating its potential role in Alzheimer’s disease.

 Thiabendazole: It is the same compound used as an antiparasitic pharmaceutical drug in humans and animals. The EPA classifies it as likely carcinogenic at doses that disrupt thyroid hormones.

 Imazalil: A systemic fungicide. California has classified it as a chemical known to cause cancer. The US EPA classified it as a probable human carcinogen as far back as 1999. Studies show it binds to hormone receptors and alters oestrogen production, making it a confirmed endocrine disruptor.

 In the US the EWG testing found imazalil on nearly 90% of non-organic citrus samples, with average concentrations running at roughly 20 times the level EWG scientists consider safe for children.

And to wrap this all up each chemical is assessed individually for safety. Nobody assesses what happens when three fungicides and three synthetic waxes are present simultaneously on the same piece of fruit — which is exactly what you are buying when you buy these oranges, or for that matter most conventional fruit on any supermarket shelf.

Organic citrus tested by the Environmental Working Group showed no detectable levels of any of these fungicides. This is not a marginal difference. It is the complete absence of the entire chemical stack listed above. I know which one I would choose. As always without your support we would not be here, I heard a great quote during the week

“Think about what you want to sustain and who you want to support rather than what you want to boycott. If you buy a product from someone you believe is doing the right thing, your money goes directly to supporting that person, that organisation and that system” Jack Clarke.

This is why 20 years on we are still growing and supporting and supplying only 100% organic fruit and vegetables.

Thank you for helping us get to 20 years!

Kenneth

what a week

by Kenneth Keavey

What a week. It has been full on, on so many levels. Life can be funny like that sometimes; it comes in waves. 

We have waited and waited for the weather, and it has finally arrived, so the farm has gone into overdrive and to be fair everybody has been putting in amazing effort and we have been busy. 

Busy in the fields and busy in the packing shed, and for that we are thankful. With the weather set to improve, it is one of the ironies of this business, that when the weather improves our orders disappear. 

As we head into a week of nice weather, I am delighted both for our collective Irish mental health and for our farm, but I am also very nervous because ironically this can have a deleterious effect on our orders, the life blood of our business.  

If you can remember us in your weekly plans for food, it makes a tremendous difference, we are not a large supermarket and are completely dependent on your orders. You make a difference.

So, we have been busy, nearly 700 tomato plants are in the ground, and they will need their first side shooting next week, we have ploughed, tilled, and made the first beds on nearly 15 acres of ground, and the first outdoor plants, (later than anticipated) will go into the ground next week: the first new season kale, cabbage and broccoli, onions, lettuce, spinach, chard and beetroot. We have already planted thousands of plants in our tunnels, and they are nearly full now. 

On a harvest front, things are getting a little tight, the most exciting thing coming soon, is the first fresh garlic bunches, no Chinese garlic here. 

I heard a quote during the week that I really liked: “Bees need weeds” and this coincided with a victory by the residents of Cornwall in the UK, to stop the local council from reintroducing Glyphosate, Why oh why would the council even consider that? So well done to the people of Cornwall. 

But the other stark fact is that the use of Roundup in the UK is up 1000% since 1990 to 2,200 tonnes. In the US, 0.5kg of this probable carcinogen is applied for every person living in the US, enough to cause some serious health problems. 

In Ireland 30% of all sales of pesticides are for Glyphosate. And here is the thing that always get me, have you ever seen a field that has been sprayed with Roundup? Well I have and it leaves me feeling quite sad, it is dead, all plant life is dead (a caveat here, the first glyphosate resistant weeds have been found recently in the UK, and in the US they have to revert to more aggressive chemical concoctions to destroy the weeds, as plants are developing resistance to this herbicide).

When a field is sprayed there is no life left for the bees and as our bees are finally flying in full fettle, it would be sad to think that we have destroyed all their food, by spraying toxic chemicals on our land, I could never do it.

You can rest assured that the bees on our farm are safe happy and well fed, maybe in part because we have left our amazing flowering kale forest and also because there are so many (but not too many) weeds left to flower.

So please support us over the next couple of weeks, and in addition to getting amazing, gorgeous chemical free food dropped to your door, you will be helping to alleviate by anxiety about running this stressful business! So, I thank you in advance.

Kenneth

When people are fighting for survival, something must give…

by Kenneth Keavey

A couple of weeks ago Micheál Martin was in the news for all the wrong reasons and ironically it may have been this time 20 years that he sowed the seeds of the discontent that was so visible last week and the beginning of the demise of the horticultural sector here in Ireland.

When I see a bag of carrots on a supermarket shelf for 29 cent, or a head of cabbage for 49 cent, something inside me tightens. If you are a grower, a farmer, or someone who has spent time working the land and growing food, you feel it deeply — it is demoralising.  

But where did all this start? How did we arrive at a place where fresh, Irish produce — some of the finest in the world — became a loss-leader, a price-war pawn, a way for billion-euro corporations to lure us through their doors at the expense of the primary producers? 

The answer traces back to one decision, made in 2006, by one minister: Micheál Martin.

He repealed the grocery order, imperfect as it was, it held a competitive norm in place across the entire market. When it went, the supermarkets turned to fresh produce as a loss-leader to drive footfall. It was perishable, visible, universally purchased, and — crucially — completely unprotected. Growers had no floor, no alternative buyers, and no leverage. The race to the bottom had found its favourite category.

“It would be cheaper to plough the vegetables back into the ground than to accept the prices supermarkets were offering.”— A carrot grower, recounted in the Oireachtas, 2026

This has left our horticultural sector in a critical condition. We import 83% of the fruit and veg we eat, and we export over 90% of the food we produce (dairy and meat), we are about as food secure as a barren rock in the middle of the Atlantic! The real threat to our food supply two weeks ago during the blockade had nothing to do with local food production and everything to do with the disruption to imports. 

But things could be better, we could grow more here. But to do that it cannot be a business with no margin, no fat in the system, nothing left on the table. When that is the model, all it takes is a fuel shock such as what we have seen last week to bring the house of cards crashing down. 

When costs rocket and you can’t get anymore for what you produce the end result is self-destruction. 

Of course we need to move beyond fossil fuel use, this is an absolute no brainer, and we now have a chance to transition to a clean green future (we have 30KW of solar energy on our packing shed and it is amazing). 

But in the meantime, for farmers and hauliers there really is very little alternative and when people are fighting for their survival something must be done. The irony of course is: if a fair price was paid for the food in the first place, then there would be enough leeway to absorb at least to some extent the price rises that have come over the last 20 years. 

As always only through your support can we continue to farm and support others that farm like we do.

Thank you

Kenneth

Reflections on a different time

by Kenneth Keavey

We are 20 years growing and delivering organic vegetables this May. Much has changed for us in the last two decades. It certainly has been a journey. I thought over the next few weeks I might share some of the highs and lows and memories that stand out for me over that time. 

Today our business employs somewhere in the region of 45 people, but back in the early days there was just me, my wife Jenny and my dad, Michael. I remember growing our first crops very unsuccessfully I have to say.

I had very little experience but had high aspirations. We put up our first polytunnel in 2005, and started growing in it in 2005 and started our business in 2006. 

We had our first visit from the local Garda around then.  We were just sitting down to our dinner one evening and there was a knock on the door, the Garda wanted to see what we had growing in this strange plastic house….. 20 years ago, there were none around, at least not this side of the country.

Suffice it to say he saw some strange plants for the West of Ireland, aubergine, tomato, peppers and cucumber, and the Garda went away not completely satisfied. I am not sure he was completely happy with the aubergine plant we had growing, I think he may have thought it was something else,  I assured him, (even though there was a distinct lack of aubergines) that in fact it was an eggplant, plant!  We never grew aubergines again.

Back then Jenny was working outside the farm (today she works full time as a primary school teacher) and if it wasn’t for her income, we would not have survived, I don’t think we managed to take any form of income out of the business for the first five years. Our work week did not stop we worked all the time, we were growing the vegetables, importing vegetables, taking orders, answering the phones, packing the orders, building makeshift coldrooms and shelving, figuring out which bit fitted into which bit on our very old small tractor, fixing things that were constantly breaking down, weeding, sowing, weeding, planting, weeding, harvesting, it was nonstop. 

We packed our first boxes in our shed behind our house, on scaffolding planks set up on used Guiness barrels. 

There was no time to think, or to take holidays. There was no social media, the internet and online shopping was in its infancy, people paid us in cash, we collected the cash when we delivered our boxes, we counted the cash, deposited the cash, and always we were weeding and despite the cash we actually had no cash, we were broke.  

It was busy and it was just us; we had no responsibility for anybody else, there is a freedom in that, but also pressure and limitations, because as we quickly figured out you cannot do everything yourself. 

We had debt, we had fun, we had customers, at least some (don’t get me started on the supermarkets, I’ll keep that for another day).  We had good weeks bad weeks and everything in between, but we seemed somehow or another to make it work, we hired our first real employee, a massive milestone and a huge learning curve, and always we were weeding and learning, to be continued….

Your support for our farm and our small independent business means so much

As always thank you for your support.

Kenneth

Hope springs eternal

by Kenneth Keavey

I was hopeful this week that we would get our first vegetable beds made, but the soil is saturated, and more rain has arrived and more is forecast, it does not bode well for spring planting, this year crops will be delayed. Field conditions at least in the West of Ireland are poor and the soil is still cold and there is a distinct absence of life, I guess the earthworms and little bugs feel the same as we do about cold, wet damp weather. 

The excitement of a couple of weeks ago has waned a little, when we were making some good progress with our field work, it looks like for now patience is the order of the day. At least we have the tunnels to work in, and we will be planting our first new season crops (fingers crossed) at the end of next week, exciting! 

Tomatoes should follow the week after that and tomato planting usually symbolises the first proper start of the season with some brighter sunnier and dare I say it, warmer weather, we will wait and see.

In a rare absence from the farm a couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk to a growers’ network in Louth, a lovely bunch of people growing some of their own food and it was an uplifting and enjoyable experience. 

On the road up from Galway though we passed several bright yellow fields. If you are out and about this bank holiday weekend, keep an eye out for these fields, they will have an iridescent yellow tinge. 

They shine so brightly because they have been sprayed with an herbicide that has destroyed all plant life. The chemical, glyphosate, more commonly known under the brand name Roundup will have been applied to the land prior to ploughing. 

The EU had an opportunity in 2023 to ban glyphosate for good, instead it was licensed for use for a further ten years. Here’s a couple of interesting observations: prior to 1990 there were genuinely more toxic herbicides in use, there is no doubt about that, and nobody would advocate for going back there (these highly toxic chemicals are still in use in some countries) but we have traded a smaller use of genuinely horrible chemicals for an enormous use of a probable carcinogen and glyphosate is now everywhere. 

Are we any better off? No. 

Should the use of glyphosate be curtailed? Definitely. 

Is this happening? Partially. 

The ban on using it has a preharvest desiccant (it was and still is used in some countries to dry out crops prior to harvest, a genuinely terrible idea) was a positive step in the EU.

BUT there is a loophole, the use of glyphosate can still be used to treat weeds in the crop if it is 2 weeks prior to harvest. So essentially it still can be used as a desiccant, (even it this is not the stated reason). The impact will be the same, and this chemical which is systemic, will still end up in our flour, and in our bread and in our oats. 

I for one will take my porridge glyphosate free, thank you very much.

As always thank you for your support, and happy easter.

Kenneth

The Pesticide, the Darkside and the cover up

by Kenneth Keavey

We thought we were finally emerging from a relentlessly wet spring. I don’t know why but I am always surprised by rain, you would imagine at this stage after 20 years of farming and living in the West of Ireland it wouldn’t come as such a shock!

This week we had rain that can only be described as monsoon like, giant water droplets that have again saturated the ground and delayed further progress on the farm. There is little doubt now that climate chang is impacting food production globally.

We are right in the middle of the hungry gap, and we import fruit and more veg at this time of the year, and we can see form talking to other farmers in Spain, France and Holland that the weather has put massive pressure on growing systems in these countries as well as our own and has delayed and reduced harvest, it is proving difficult to get produce at present from anywhere.

This, I think makes it even more urgent to have the discussion around our own food security especially with the closure of one of our largest carrot growers two weeks ago.

But back on the farm we have had a few days of sunshine and the three days of fine weather we got last weekend we took full advantage of. We have spread all our compost, ploughed the land and tilled some of it.

We are still harvesting on the farm too. The last of our own farm parsnips are still available, we are harvesting our own leeks and from the tunnels a bumper crop of rocket and spinach and chard, we will also be harvesting loads of green kale this week and this is the crop I wanted to talk about.

Some of the green kale is on the cusp of going to flower and if the temperature gets back to over 12C then we will have our native Irish honeybees flying all over the farm. The first place they will go is to these beautiful flowers, which we will leave until the first aphid infestation begins.

But here is a couple of facts you may be interested in. In conventional systems up until relatively recently many brassica plants were sprayed with neonicotinoid pesticides to destroy amongst other things, aphids.

These chemicals are thankfully now banned in the EU. 1 teaspoon of Thiamethoxam alone can decimate over 1.25 billion bees. But this is not the end of the story. These chemicals and this one in particular is still manufactured in the EU, in Belgium by Syngenta and is exported all over the world, it is hard to get accurate data but somewhere in the region of 10,000 tonnes of the stuff is exported to other countries. If you assume that one teaspoon is 3g, then is a lot of teaspoons, it is enough to wipe out the global population of honeybees and wild bees 10 times over.

Not only that, and here is the real dark side of this (as if it was not already dark enough) Syngenta knew and did not release data that their chemicals decimated bee population, they kept this from regulators knowing the damage these chemicals did.

So, when we are told by the companies that manufacture pesticides that they are safe, and where they stand to earn billions of dollars in profit. I error on the side of caution and tend not to put too much trust in what they say.

As always, your support, protects and supports a way of farming that keeps these toxic chemicals out of our food chain and helps protect biodiversity and in this instance our native Irish honey bee too.

Thank you.

Kenneth