If you spray pesticides on your vegetable patch, then you have kinda missed the point

by Kenneth Keavey

If you are spraying pesticides in your vegetable garden, you have kinda missed the point of growing your own food in the first place.

I know for sure that my grandad did not use pesticides, he grew vegetables for himself and his family, including me when I came along. In fact, I have a memory of sitting on his lap drinking sweet, boiled turnip juice out of a tin cup. I know, I dare you to try that with your own kids today, see how far you get. I’d get thrown out of my own house if I suggested such a thing, what between the protein bars, and the smoothies, sprouting broccoli and avocados, I wouldn’t stand a chance. There is no doubt our food system has changed, some for the good, some for the not so good.

He grew carrots, they were amazing, my dad grew carrots they were amazing. My Grandad grew carrots for the Johnsons and the Blakes the families that lived in Cregg castle, he was the head gardener there and grew those vegetables in the walled garden at Cregg. Those families were the lucky ones, they didn’t need to subsist on a diet of potatoes and turnip juice. They had tomatoes, imagine tomatoes on your plate locally grown in the 1950s. it did happen you know. But you know something else? They were an absolute luxury, no doubt about it.

I mean where else would you have gotten tomatoes in the West of Ireland in the 1950s as a normal person, you wouldn’t, and when or if you ever did, imagine what that would have been like? I do remember podding peas, that was a remarkable thing, really and truly.

I also remember harvesting the apples and the jam jars hanging on strings to stop the wasps, I remember all the different varieties of apples, and of putting them on metal sheets in the shed to keep them for the autumn and stop disease spreading by spacing them out.

It was a different era, some good some not so good.

But you know what my grandad and my dad did not do? They did not use pesticides, they didn’t. My grandad had two work horses, one was called Snowball and he also had a small mixed farm, the same one we have now, he never sprayed it. It wasn’t a conscious choice, he just didn’t have the option, there were no chemicals available to him and yet he grew the food.

The food was tasty, simple wholesome. As I have gotten older, I still love a simple meal of new potatoes and fresh seasonal veggies, what’s not to love about that?

Chemistry belongs in a lab not on our food, there is little doubt that going out to spray our food with chemicals to stop other creatures from eating it and then bringing that food into our homes and eating it ourselves is a little bit silly.

As always, we need your support during the summer more than ever, the time of the best Irish seasonal plenty.

Thank you

Kenneth

PS PLEASE if you can at all continue to support us during the summer we would really appreciate it. If you haven’t gotten your ticket for our sustainability festival yet, please click here to get yours, this is a not for profit event to celebrate all that is good in food in Ireland, check out the line-up it promises to be an amazing day.

A remarkably stressful rollercoaster

by Kenneth Keavey

The last few weeks have been a remarkably stressful rollercoaster. If you think local sustainable food growing is important, we still need your help.

We have gone from our lowest level of orders in 9 months to the highest in the space of one week, then a week later we are dropping back again. We have gone from a huge harvest from our farm to harvests being impacted by heat stress, the irony of tomatoes not ripening because the temperatures in our polytunnels have exceeded 45C is not lost on me.

This week we are facing a new crisis, the soil moisture levels are at a critical point, we are now irrigating in the West of Ireland. The courgettes are producing massive amounts of fruits, but the leaves are extremely spiky, this only happens when there is not enough water in the soil.

A nationwide hosepipe ban tells us here in Ireland that the water is low, climate change is real, and data centres are definitely not where we want to be using our precious resource. The celery is stressed and as we start harvesting, we have already seen patches that are affected by stress related disease. The sprouting broccoli is bolting, the swedes are struggling, the cucumbers are aborting and leeks are dying.

Our weather station is measuring a drop of 50% in soil moisture content in the last 10 days, with no rain of any consequence on the horizon. Never say commercial growing is for the faint hearted. I have found that the pressures to produce food and then sell the food when we have it can be very challenging. Our chosen model is labour intensive and is about connecting people with how our food is grown. We will not deviate from the path, just last weekend we had over 100 people on our farm walk.

I believe connecting people with our food, with our environment, and the importance of growing food without chemicals is critical for our health and the health of the planet, today more than ever. I imagine as one of our readers, supporters, you may share this view?

Our food system has disconnected us from our food, it has disconnected us from the truth behind our food, pesticides are still in use, maybe now more than ever. Supermarket food culture is based on profit before all else, this has taken its toll on growers not just across Ireland but across the world.

This is not sustainable. There is another way, but this way does not fit the large distribution centres, and the current model of selling fresh food as cheaply as possible. I wonder do we need to start thinking more about value and less about the cost of our food?

When we value something, we are less inclined to waste it, when we value something we hold it close, we become more mindful about it, we treat it with a greater degree of respect. From our perspective as growers, setting aside acres of land each year to allow the soil to regenerate incurs a very real financial cost, but it is repaid in allowing us to grow more nutrient dense food and a stronger more resilient ecosystem.

Most farmers cannot afford such a luxury as they feed into the insatiable supermarket machine, where uniformity and price are the overriding factors in meeting contract supply criteria. So how can we get to a place where growing food without pesticides and with nature is the norm?

Well to be honest that is exactly what we are doing, and your support means the food system we are developing has a chance.

Please continue to support us during the summer.

Thanks

Kenneth

This is a plea, can you help us?

by Kenneth Keavey

As I write this, I am sitting in field of courgettes, of which there are about 700 I think, next week we will probably harvest over half a tonne, and currently many of those courgettes we just don’t have homes for. 

The worst-case scenario is we harvest these and must put them on the compost heap. This is deeply demoralising, we have worked hard for at least 6 months to get the land and the food ready and now it is and not to be able to sell it, is an impossible situation.

We are one of only 60-70 field scale vegetable growers left in Ireland, but if you are reading this you probably already know that. Over the last three weeks we find ourselves in a desperate situation.

Many of you our customers have stopped ordering for the summer, and we have seen a drastic decline in orders, all for completely understandable reasons: Schools closing, people going on holidays, and ironically the hot weather, which has disrupted cooking routines, nobody wants to be in a hot kitchen cooking in the heat. 

This is ironic because the good weather has meant that our farm is now overflowing with produce, and not just our farm but many other small scale Irish organic farms up and down the country, the kind that do not supply supermarkets, those that frequent farmers markets and many of which also supply us. 

Last year as most years our farm made a loss.  We would love that one day we could say, do you know what? This year was different we made it; we covered our costs. Making that difference starts right here at the end of June, as the season is relatively short, the weeks and months of seasonal plenty need to be just that, busy weeks.

It is the most amazing time to source local seasonal organic produce, and a time when Ireland desperately needs more sustainable vegetable growers, in fact there couldn’t be a better time.  

The last thing I want to do is have to put pen to paper to ask for your help, but as I sit here in our field of courgettes, I am not sure what else I can do.

“Can you help us?”

If you can spread the word, share this note, tell a friend, obviously if you can place an order that would be wonderful, or just send us a small bit of positivity, all would be amazingly received.

Your help could be the pivotal factor in keeping our farm and farms like ours operational. We have built our farm and business on the principle of fairness and reconnecting people with their food, and we work hard at that, we do not supply supermarkets, and so we depend on orders like yours.

And I would like you to know, even though I say it every single week that your support fundamentally makes a difference, to us, to our farm, to other Irish organic farms, to biodiversity, to nature, to the planet, and finally to your health, it really does.

So, thank you so much for taking the time to read this and for whatever you can do we will be deeply grateful.

Kenneth

PS. If you are away and you cannot order, please remember the summer is long and every week for us during the summer can be a struggle, so please order when you are back. But if you would like to support us anyway, then why not order a charity box, which will be donated to St Vincent de Paul, or gift an order to a friend, who would not appreciate the gift of sustainable food delivered to their door anywhere in Ireland.

Where have all our insects gone?

by Kenneth Keavey

Next time you drive down the motorway check your windscreen, is it covered in splattered insects? This used to be the case, but now sadly there are so few insects left that in fact our windscreens are mostly clear.

In 2019 a study published by Danish researcher Anders Møller showed that insect numbers splattered on cars declined by more than 80% between 1997 and 2017. An earlier landmark study by Hallman et al in 2017 stated that “There has been more than a 75% decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas”. This study was breathtaking in its scope and involved nearly three decades of continuous, data collection across 63 sites.

This German study tracked insect biomass in nature reserves— protected land. The insects were gone because the fields around them were sprayed with herbicides and pesticides. Have you ever heard of tramlines? The tramlines I am talking about here are tractor tracks through in particular cereal fields (and vegetable fields).

Next time you drive past a field of wheat or barley, look for these tramlines — those tracks running through the crop. They’re permanent spray lanes, put there at sowing so a tractor can enter the field over and over to apply chemicals. A typical Irish cereal crop gets sprayed four to six times between October and June.

Cereal fields (and increasing grass monocultures where all diverse plants are removed by selective herbicides) are essentially a chemical monoculture from October through June — no flowering weeds (removed by herbicide), no insects able to complete life cycles in or around the crop, nothing for birds to eat. The tram lines are the visible manifestation of the chemical applications. The crop looks green and healthy. What isn’t visible is the biological silence inside it. They’re the signature of an industrial spray programme, written in bare soil across every tillage field in Ireland.

There is more evidence of the devastation wrought by chemical agriculture, populations of European grassland butterflies are estimated to have declined by 50% in abundance between 1990 and 2011. In England, the total abundance of butterfly species declined by 58% on farmed land between 2000 and 2009, despite a doubling of conservation spending.

And finally in the USA in the last three decades, monarch butterfly populations have declined by 80–95%. Researchers studying monarchs found on average traces of seven pesticides in each individual butterfly studied. But the application of glyphosate and the destruction of milkweed a key plant that Monarchs feed on is a critical part of the population collapse.

So, the next time you drive down a motorway and you notice those tram lines, have a look at the insect splatter on your windscreen and remember the application of herbicides and pesticides and fungicides do not only impact our health but also the health of our little living friends that we share this earth with and whom we rely on for pollination and our food. (Over 75% of human-cultivated crops worldwide depend directly on insect pollination. About 88% of all flowering plants are pollinated by insects.)

As always thank you for your support, it means a great deal.

Kenneth

PS It is definitely holiday season and we are seeing harvest rolling in from the fields and also a marked increase in the absence of orders. If you are considering ordering please do, it will help us enormously especially at this time. Thank you.

I am so upset, and hopeful…

by Kenneth Keavey

What are we doing to our planet? In equal measure I feel sad and angry, how can we treat our home like we do, spraying chemicals on our land, dumping plastic in our beautiful oceans, consuming resources beyond what the planet can offer, pouring earth warming gases into the atmosphere which may well end up being the greatest travesty of our time.

The never-ending pursuit of profit, driven by greed, this it seems is all that matters to the corporate leaders. The maths doesn’t add up, it cannot continue, we will be the ultimate losers.

Why does the whole fresh food industry have to be based on aggression? From growing to pricing, to selling? Whatever happened to partnership, and fairness? Couldn’t it be different?

The phenomenal scale of corporate greed behind it all, big industry, big ag, big food, they are all the same, and they are ruining our planet. Not only that but these companies and their lobbying groups are causing epidemics of chronic disease. 

It doesn’t need to be like this.

We received a lovely comment from a customer last week, I think it highlights what we have been fighting for, for the last twenty years, and reading this fills me with hope. 

“… Your service gives me time that I would otherwise spend researching suppliers, chasing down seasonal produce and trying to verify how food has been grown and sourced. Instead, I get to spend that time with my children. They eat well, they learn that food has seasons, and they develop an appreciation for quality, provenance and value that extends beyond a price tag.

Most importantly, I am paying for the confidence that someone else is doing the work of finding produce that has been grown and sourced in the way I would choose myself. If I attempted to do that sourcing (or growing!) personally, it would require far more of my own time and effort. In many ways, I am paying for your time so that I can spend mine where it matters most.

The produce is wonderful, but the real value lies in everything that happens before it reaches my doorstep.”

The cornerstone of our business is anchored in healthy, chemical free food, and a food system that restores the earth and by default our health. Our business is a system that is fair to our food producers, to our partners, to our farmers, to our bodies, to our land, to the living creatures we share the earth with. A food system that can enrich our lives, can energise our bodies, that can make us well not sick, and can heal our planet. We don’t have a big farm, but we have many other farms that we work with, farms that share our common goal, to make this world a bit better, to make our health a little better, and to restore some sanity to a food system that has gone over the edge. 

Thank you for using your power wisely, your support is evidence enough for us to keep our heads down and heading in the right direction.

Thank you

Kenneth

A company of contradictions….?

by Kenneth Keavey

When we started out 20 years ago, as we struggled to contain the weeds on our 0.25 acre plot, we had two pieces of wisdom imparted to us. Never let a weed see Sunday, a fair statement, meaning if a plant doesn’t go to seed you won’t have a million more minions to deal with in short order. The other was “Why not use a touch of Roundup?”, I love this one, because it frames the chemical as benign, but far from benign Roundup is!

A company that makes €2.9 billion a year from a product with 67,000 pending cancer lawsuits against it, while simultaneously targeting €10 billion in cancer drug sales by 2030, has structural incentives that are deeply misaligned with public health.

No conspiracy here, but there are two outrageously conflicting business units in operation under one corporation here. Bayer the giant Agri pharmaceutical company does just that. The question I often wonder about is why with all the litigation against it doesn’t Bayer withdraw Roundup from the market.

Well, there is the €2.9 billion in sales for one thing, but there is another massive revenue stream that is often overlooked where the discussion of Roundup is concerned, Roundup ready crops.

The US government’s own agricultural statistics tell the story starkly. In 2025, 96% of all US soybean acres were planted with herbicide-tolerant seeds — the highest adoption rate ever recorded. Around 92% of domestic US corn acres are produced with herbicide-tolerant seeds, and 93% of cotton acres are genetically engineered herbicide tolerant. So, the real Bayer agrochemical empire looks like this:

Glyphosate herbicide: ~€2.9 billion/year

Full Crop Science division (mainly Roundup ready crops): €21.6 billion/year

Cancer drug ambition by 2030: €10 billion target

It’s an interesting summary, Bayer OWN nearly the whole Soybean, Corn and Cotton production in the US, not to mention lentils and chickpeas too. They own the plants; they own the rights. They own the food system. They make a colossal sum from the crop sciences division, which is nearly entirely based on the patented Glyphosate resistant plants.

You couldn’t make this up, and now because the American food system is dependent on Roundup it looks like they are going to be protected by the US government from the fact that their product probably causes cancer.

Bayer’s strategy is explicit: a favourable ruling by the US Supreme Court could largely end the Roundup litigation — the argument being that since the EPA approved the label without a cancer warning, no state-based lawsuit for failure to warn should be allowed to proceed. If they win that case, which is currently before the Supreme Court in the US, the entire litigation mountain largely disappears — and they keep the revenue.

They are winning and make no mistake this will give them a green light to continue here in Europe also.

Now I may be wrong, and maybe it is just coincidence, but to me there seems to be a resurgence in the use of glyphosate right here on our home turf. Literally on our turf. Everywhere now there are fields sprayed, road verges sprayed.

I was at Bloom last weekend and had a several discussions about the addiction to this product and the damage it does to biodiversity and how unnecessary it is.

One thing for sure, Roundup has no place on our farm or food, so thank you for your support, it means we can keep biodiversity healthy and keep this toxic chemical out of our food supply.

Kenneth

PS To celebrate our 20 years in business, we are very excited to announce our very first Sustainability festival on the 12th of September, this promises to be an amazing day of celebrating all that is right and proper in the Irish food system, nearly half the tickets are already sold, so why not grab yours now.

Also, we will be running our usual farm walk but this year we have planned it for the 18th of July, there is a nominal charge for this, and again numbers are strictly limited, please find all the info here.

 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.

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

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