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He repealed the grocery order, imperfect as it was, it held a competitive norm in place across the entire market.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

Three Anniversaries…

by Kenneth Keavey

I can’t actually believe it. Finally, after what has felt like an eternity of rain we have sunshine, just enough maybe, to dry out the fields, at least I really hope so.  It needs to be enough to get the manure out in the fields and for the ploughing to start. So far for the farm there has been no sense that things are starting, but now at last maybe we are ready to go.

It has been a long drag since Christmas; I am sure there were records broken on the greatest number of consecutive days of rain. I bet you have felt it too? The dark, damp weather would depress even the most committed optimist.

We have our first plants arriving just after Easter from our plant raiser in Dublin: John Cahil has been minding and raising our first 750 tomato plants, and we can’t wait to get them into the soil in the polytunnel as well as the first outdoor brassica plants.

So, the season begins, and you would want optimism and a high degree of financial insulation to continue in this field (no pun intended). The cost of production over the last 20 years has risen without any checks or balances, while the price paid for veg has dropped. 

This coincides with three anniversaries:

  1. We are 20 years in business this May! We have some very, very exciting news coming on this soon.
  2. It is 20 years since a piece of legislation was introduced by none other than Michael Martin at the height of the Celtic Tiger Era. The repeal of the grocery order opened the gateway to below cost selling of fresh produce by supermarkets and all protections for primary producers was lifted.
  3. There were over 600 commercial field scale vegetable producers in 2006, today there are just 73. 

The Repeal of the grocery order was a pivotal regulatory moment that allowed for the first time below cost selling, or loss leading of fresh produce by supermarket chains. Supermarkets weaponised fresh produce to get consumers in the door, it was effectively the start of the end for the sector here in Ireland.

The IFA described how supermarkets began using fresh produce as “cannon fodder in their armoury as part of the battle for market share,” saying that below-cost selling and food deflation has led to “the demise of the horticulture industry in Ireland.” The price war model, they argued, “takes the inherent value out of the produce lines, leaving it difficult to ensure sustainable farmgate prices. We all know the story at this stage. 

The big question worth asking as we look to an uncertain future impacted by climate change and the reliance on imported food, what happens when there is an unprecedented shock, what happens if we have no more producers left here, where then will we look to for our food? We currently import 84% of all the fruit and veg we consumer in Ireland.

The key lever we as consumer often overlook is that we have an enormous amount of power when it comes to our food and we can choose where we want to put that support.

As always thank you for your support, it has meant we have made it to 20 years against all the odds, and for the first time I am quietly confident that maybe we have turned a corner, and that our farm and business model is working, so thank you.

Kenneth

Another Irish Veg farm has closed. Who’s next?

by Kenneth Keavey

Another vegetable grower has gone out of business. This time it’s one of the largest carrot producers in the country, supplying nearly 12% of the island’s carrots.

Hughes Farming and Agriculture, a major operator employing 45 staff, has closed its doors overnight and declared bankruptcy. Watch this week’s Instagram video on the topic here. 

How can this be? And where will we be if we continue down this road?

In the early 1990s there were over 600 commercial vegetable growers in Ireland.

As of last week there were 74. Now there are 73.

The sector is in serious trouble. Why?

There are many factors, but the biggest is simple: the price paid for produce by supermarkets versus the cost of producing it.

Since 2010, inflation and wage costs have increased dramatically. Vegetable production is hugely labour-intensive. The reality is that the price paid for vegetables has actually decreased since 2003, while the cost of producing them has soared.

In 2003 the minimum wage in Ireland was €6.35. Since then it has increased by 123%.

Yet the price paid to farmers for their produce has fallen. That is not sustainable Supermarket pricing and buying practices have played a major role in bringing us to this point.

So we need to ask ourselves an honest question:

Are we comfortable seeing all our vegetable growers disappear?

Ireland today imports over 84% of its fruit and vegetables. Are we happy for that to reach 100%? Because if we continue as we are, that is exactly where we are heading.

And it’s not just pricing.

Vegetable growers now face the increasing risks of climate instability. This year we have not ploughed a single field yet because of relentless and unprecedented rain.

Why would anyone choose to take on that risk, for returns that often don’t even cover the cost of production? I see it on our own farm every year.

Growing vegetables can be a loss-making enterprise. The only reason we can continue is because we have our own retail arm, which gives us some control over where the small profits in the business are allocated. 

Without that, we simply could not keep the farm going.

But it should not be like this.

Supermarket price wars, loss-leading vegetables, deregulation, and consumer buying habits all play their part.

The work is hard, physical and relentless. The thanks are few. Yet what we do is fundamental. It is about food security.

There will be very little we can do with iPhones if we run out of food.

And perhaps the saddest thing is that we have reduced food to something it was never meant to be: a plastic-wrapped commodity, sold as cheaply as possible, offered up on the altar of unrestrained capitalism.

Food should be a celebration of who we are.

So what happens now?

What happens to the 45 employees who worked there?
What happens to the supply of local food?
What happens to the skill and expertise built up over decades?

We can still take action.

We can choose to support Irish growers — not just when their produce is on discount, but when it reflects the true cost of producing real food.
We can support local farmers, farm shops, markets, and box schemes.
We can visit farms, go on farm walks, and learn what is involved in producing food.

There is a lot we can do.

I just hope it is not too late.

This year we begin our 20th growing season, and I find myself wondering what it will bring.

As always, thank you for your support.

It truly makes all the difference.

Kenneth

When they are gone they are gone… and a great discussion this week…

by Kenneth Keavey

Just this week I had the privilege of being invited to a panel discussion and the Launch of the “GIY story” which is aired on RTE every Tuesday.  It was a very interesting discussion between Mick Kelly (GIY founder), Pippa Hacket, former minster for the departure of Agriculture, Paul Brophy the largest broccoli grower in Ireland and me.

What is the future of Irish horticulture and food? Or in fact is there a future in Irish horticulture? These were the questions being addressed.  There is little doubt that supermarket food culture has been responsible for the devastation for the horticultural industry in Ireland the exact numbers of commercial growers in Ireland (numbers supplied by Bordbia) has reduced from just over 600 growers in 2000 to 74 growers today.

That is a shocking contraction, the bottom line is clear and stark.  The pricing that has been forced on farmers over the last 26 years has caused this exodus. 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.

None of this is helped by the “Fake farm” nonsense that is still practiced today, this too is a mechanism to hand the power to the supermarkets. Take “Farrells” in one well known discounter, this lovely Irish family name has been placed on packs to give the impression that it is a real farm, IT IS NOT.

So it is with this backdrop that we went to the fields this week to dig the last of the parsnips, in the unrelenting cold and wet, not at all ideal conditions. To be fair, we did get a break and when we started digging it was actually dry. We have had nearly two full dry days in the last 60, who said it rains all the time in Ireland.

We are in an organic programme with Teagasc and they have kindly given us a weather station, (which I have yet to set it up, in fact when I am finished writing this that is exactly what I am going to do) once set up we will have an accurate local record of rainfall amounts from now on, it should prove for interesting reading, and maybe we will start to see in real local time the impact that man-made climate change is having on our local weather systems.

As always thank you for your support, supermarkets won’t miss you, but we will.

Kenneth

Are we looking in the wrong places?

by Kenneth Keavey

When faced with a health crisis, a serious health crisis, we will pay whatever is within
our means to find a way out, there is no price too great. As health services around
the globe strain under the burden of populations afflicted by unprecedented levels of
chronic illness, we look to pharmaceuticals to ease the pain. Mostly though these
drugs treat symptoms and not the root causes.


Science is amazing and some of these drugs are breathtaking in their power and
completely necessary. But it is certainly easier to reach for a pill to solve a problem
than maybe making the systemic changes necessary to effect real long-term change.
Our food: clean healthy food eaten most of the time can help carry us into old age
without the unnecessary baggage of chronic illness, and a big bunch of daily
pharmaceuticals.


So, the question needs to be asked are we looking in the wrong places for ways to
stay healthy for as long as we can?
Stress and our food choices play a large role in the incidence of modern illnesses.


There is little question that the chemicals added to our food and the chemicals found
sprayed on our fresh food are not contributing in a positive way to our health. These
chemicals at low doses we are told are thought to be safe, but many are toxic,
irritants, hormone disruptors and some are carcinogenic or at least probably
carcinogenic. The best way to avoid these chemicals is to grow your own or source
certified organic produce.


Two weeks ago, we went to visit the largest organic trade show in the world in
Nuremberg in Germany. It was eye opening and inspiring and we found some
amazing new suppliers.


There were over 2200 companies there and we came home buzzing. (Caveat, if
there is an Irish supplier we will absolutely stock them first, but the organic industry
in Ireland is small) we found amazing fresh cakes, (plant based, but you wouldn’t
ever know it, with clean ingredients) a fantastic ready meal provider from Germany
making gorgeous plant based, healthy meals. I mean convenience and healthy and
tasty this I think is a rare enough occurrence. All organic of course.


We have developed a relationship with one Italian supplier that produces the best
Italian pastas and sauces, and we cannot wait to get them onto our shelves.
It’s funny, with fresh food it is easy to make the connection between possible
pesticide contamination and our health, it seems very real, like the chemicals can still
be on the broccoli leaves.


But when it comes to grocery items it is more difficult, and somewhere at least in my
brain, I think oh it is processed so it is fine. But say when it comes to grains, like
wheat or oats, it is probably even more important to choose organic, as these are some of the most heavily sprayed items on supermarket shelves. That is why we
were so excited last year when we partnered with Carraig Rua and their amazing
bread, and why we are excited to develop relationships with more truly amazing
organic producers that can supply the very best quality organic fare.


As always thanks for your support it makes all the difference.


Kenneth

Pay the farmer or pay the pharma

by Kenneth Keavey

Michael Pollan once said “eat food. not too much. mostly plants.” – good advice it would seem. I would add to that maybe do not eat ingredients you cannot pronounce. 

Toxic chemicals are on our plants, are in our food chain and are in our soil. Just this week Bayer agreed to pay out $7.5 billion to settle weedkiller cancer cases against them for not telling people Roundup potentially causes cancer, crucially they are not admitting liability or that Roundup causes cancer. 

There, is a theory that the large food corporations, large agribusiness and the pharma industry are in cahoots, I would surmise that this is not too far from the actual truth. This intersection is characterized by shared financial interests, joint lobbying efforts, and, in some cases, overlapping ownership between food companies, nutrition groups, and pharmaceutical firms. It is also worth noting that Bayer have a very significant health care division. 

There is little doubt that modern food is making us sick. 

On one hand we have an industry that manufacturers calorie rich fake food, that is designed to be highly addictive. These ultra processed products make us sick. Then you have an industry that creates drugs that help manage the symptoms of the disease this artificial food creates. It would seem like the perfect business model, make people sick, profit off that, then profit again from treating the sickness. 

Both business models are driven by greed (Altruism in the pharmaceutical and agribusiness died a long time ago), the mantra now is profit above all else. 

I am not so naive to think that profit is not important (we have spent many years struggling to survive and I can tell you first hand this is no fun) of course profit is important, but if that is all that is important then we have a problem. 

In fact, this single ideology is the root cause of the devastation of our planet and our health, and both are closely interwoven. 

Just this week scientists were making peace with the fact that we are on track to have to accept 3C of global warming, this will essentially make our world unliveable. The basic underlying reason for this, greed. 

Today our bodies must contend with toxic chemicals that have been sprayed on our food, and toxic chemicals being added to our processed food, we are sick and by all accounts getting sicker. 

There may be one simple solution, and it goes back to Michael Pollan’s maxim “eat food, not too much, mainly plants”. Eat fresh food, grown without toxic chemicals. Eat more home cooked food. Eat ingredients you know and recognise (Or as one person said, ingredients your grandmother would recognise). If we do this most of the time or at least some of the time and put our money into our food, then we will have to pay out much less to the Pharma’s of the world. 

With your support we are changing the food system, so thank you.

Kenneth

PS I would like to thank Jacinta Dalton from the Atlantic Technological University Galway City for the title inspiration here.

Where have all the vegetable growers gone?

by Kenneth Keavey

Bordering our farm on all sides are fields of grass, there are no crops, no vegetables, but there are cows and there is grass. But where have all the vegetable growers gone? It used to be part of our culture and our heritage and more important than that we used to produce our own food, today over 70% of our fruit and veg is imported and some reports put it as high as 83%. There are approximately 60 commercial field scale vegetable producers left in Ireland. 

That means the majority of the fruit and veg we eat here in Ireland is now grown abroad. What happened to cause this? 

There are many reasons most probably. But one reason stands out above all others, the constant race to the bottom to give the cheapest possible price to the consumer by supermarkets has had a big part to play. Loss leading of fresh Irish produce over the years has not been kind to the vegetable farmer and you can’t really blame farmers for getting out of the business. 

It is a labour intensive business and it is difficult to attract people into a job that typically cannot compete with wages that other industries offer, and yet we must but the sad fact is that the end product, the fresh carrot or parsnip, does not pay the bills. 

This is something we have seen on our farm for many years. Our farm loses money and if it was not for you our customers and our retail business we would not survive as an independent entity. 

I still figure we need to keep going, need to keep growing, need to persist, it may well be the definition of madness and certainly doing the same thing and expecting different results is definitely that. 

It is a fraught endeavour to be involved in, and these days there is also the added uncertainty of climate change, which is bearing down hard and fast on all of us. But when you are out in the fields and your product is at the mercy of the weather you have much less control. 

All in all, it doesn’t paint a very positive picture, and yet, I love growing organic food, growing local food, and supporting other local organic farmers. There are certain glimmers of hope all round, your support for us, is one massive beacon. Younger people 

So, we will keep banging the drum and keep marching on, to what end I am not sure, but as we embark on our 20th growing season, I am hopeful for the future of local organic produce. 

As always thank you for your support it makes every difference. 

Kenneth