There should be no food grown that we don’t own

by Kenneth Keavey

Just this week I was at the Pesticide Action Network conference in Dublin.

The EU is about to pass legislation that will role back protections that have been put in place over the last number of years to limit the use of pesticides in our food and on our land.  This new law is called “The food and Safety Omnibus law”

There is an urban myth that the head of Monsanto (the manufacturer of Glyphosate) once said:

“There should be no food grown that we don’t own”

I am sure he did not say this in public, but you can be sure that Monsanto most definitely had their eye on owning our food supply back in the heady days of GMO crops and Roundup’s unstoppable march across the world back in the late 90s and early 2000s.

The EU commission has met on numerous occasions with industry lobbying groups, including Bayer, CropLife Europe (a large agribusiness funded pro-pesticide group) and the largest farming group across Europe “Copa Cogeca” who have called for “unlimited” approval of pesticides. 

The new proposal represents a step backwards in the protections for our health and our land. 

One MEP, a right-wing Italian MEP who is an advocate for the new laws has met 9 times since March of this year with organisations including fertiliser groups (As reported by the Financial Times).

3 main changes if this law is passed:

  1. Under the existing rules pesticides must be reviewed every 15 years. The commission has proposed amongst many other industry requests, removing this safeguard. Cast your mind back to 2023 when glyphosate came up for renewal, its licence was renewed for a further 10 years, our own government here in Ireland voted very much in favour of its renewal. Under the new proposal Glyphosate would not have had this review and would have unlimited use into the future.

2. Another industry request “exempting pesticides from bans where they are deemed necessary to maintain crop yields” and this too has been adopted. currently harmful pesticides are only granted exemptions where crops would be directly threatened by a pest, a higher hurdle to cross.

3. Another industry request “extend the grace period from 18 months to 3 years after a pesticide is banned” has also been adopted.

If you would like to voice your concern and opposition to this bill, there is a petition you can sign here.

Of course, supporting organic farming is another step you can take to help ensure our land and our health is protected, and we need your support each week to keep going in a world dominated by cheap industrial food.

Thank you as always for your support

Kenneth

Why were so many people upset by this last week?

by Kenneth Keavey

We were blown away with your support for our celery plants last week, thank you so much, you have saved the celery from certain doom by a fungus called Septoria. But before we reached for the synthetic fungicide spray (We never do) we harvested it all and sent it out to you, so thank you so much.

We don’t and won’t supply supermarkets, it’s not for us.  We have you guys each week supporting our farm, and I will tell you now that you are amazing for doing so, thank you. There are few and far between businesses like ours that operate outside the €22 billion supermarket grocery net, but there are some. When you find them support them if you can. 

Now supermarkets are important we all use them, and they have a role in keeping us fed, we would not survive without them. But we as a farm and business have decided that we would prefer to operate by connecting directly with you, our customers rather than handing out power to the supermarkets.

The main reason for this decision, is it means we can operate in the way we see fit. So, we can do things sustainably, we can avoid plastic use by using compostable or paper packaging, we can work in a way that protects biodiversity and your health, in a way that is fair to our land, our planet, and to other growers we share this journey with, and in a way that keeps chemicals out of our food and land.

On that note, last week I got a load of agitated souls getting quite upset about the facts I shared around glyphosate, for instance, it is a “probable carcinogen, not my info, that of the World Health Organisation”.  It is fair enough through I suppose that conventional farmers would be annoyed, they didn’t design the system, but why advocate for big agri-corporations that make billions off our food system? 

Our food system has glyphosate embedded in it. How do we function without it? How can we grow food, the transformation will not happen overnight, it will take time and money to transition to a new food system, and with climate breakdown bringing all sorts of extreme challenges to our doors, transition we must.

How ever you feel about the health implications of glyphosate, for me it is the intensive agricultural industry it props up that I have issue with. Imagine a world where we did not have factory farms with animals being fed genetically modified glyphosate drenched maize and soya, where over 70% of the land we use is used to farm animals, or the crops that feed them (all sprayed intensively) to provide only 17% of all our calories, this my friends is not a future that will end well for any of us. 

AND NO! Not all soya is used to feed vegans, it is in fact all (nearly) used to feed cows, and right here in Ireland too. Next time you are in your local calf nut provider place have a look at the ingredients on the label of your GMO nuts, I think you may find it interesting.

So where do we go from there, well I certainly know by virtue of the support we have for our farm that we go to a place where a better fairer food system is possible and a place where we can all benefit from a thriving nature, that feeds our bodies and souls and protects our land.

So, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the uplift last week, keep us in mind, don’t forget, I wish I didn’t have to do these things to get your attention but I know we are all busy and have so many conflicting pulls on our time, so thank you for stopping for a moment of awareness and supporting us.

Kenneth

An Organic diet cuts pesticide levels in our bodies

by Kenneth Keavey

There is little question that an organic diet cuts pesticides levels in our bodies. It has to, there is no synthetic pesticides sprayed on organic food. A study in 2020 of 4 families that were put on an organic diet for 6 days, had a marked decrease in pesticides in their urine including levels of Glyphosate which decreased by 70.93% while AMPA (a chemical added to make glyphosate more effective) levels decreased by 76.71%. The authors concluded that diet is a primary source of glyphosate exposure. 

The same families showed decreases in levels of 40 of the most commonly used agricultural pesticides. 

Although there is safe levels set for all pesticide exposure in our food called MRLs (maximum residue limits), the two things that have not and would be very difficult to assess is the cumulative effect over time if we are consistently consuming small amounts of these chemicals, and the second thing is the cocktail effect of having a number of these different chemicals in our body at the same time. 

Take apples for instance. It is Irish apple season right now, and apples are one of the most sprayed fruits on supermarket shelves, the average apple gets sprayed on average 30 TIMES in a season. In a recent EU study, the most toxic pesticides contaminated 71% of the samples, while 64% of the samples contained at least one PFAS pesticide. Neurotoxic pesticides were found on 36% of the samples. Link to source here.

We are very lucky to not only have amazing organic apples from a Fairtrade Coop in France, but also fantastic Irish organic apples from Richard Galvin in Waterford. 

This brings me to our humble spinach and the little holes we find on it. It may not be the mostly slightly, but once you cook, blend or freeze it who would know, and more importantly it is a clear indication that the spinach in question has never seen a pesticide. Spinach frequently features on the dirty dozen list (US based info) but it is also sprayed here in the EU. 

The EU samples spinach at random every three years under its coordinated control programme. The most recent published round is 2022 and here is what they found: 

51.4% of samples had no quantifiable residues, 47% had residues within legal limits, and 1.6% exceeded the maximum residue level (MRL). So bottom line, half had pesticides and half did not. 

We are at the height of harvest at the moment, and we have loads of our own produce and produce from other organic farmers right now. Can you support us next week? I asked last week what we can do to make things easier and many of you responded with some brilliant ideas so thank you for that, we will look at them all and see what we can put in place. Please remember us in your weekly shop next week if you can. 

As always thank you so much for your support, it means so much.

Kenneth

PS thank you to everybody who came to our festival and supported our celebration of 20 years a couple of weeks ago, it was so nice to meet so many of you. The fact you took the time and made the effort to travel to our farm was truly amazing, thank you

Glyphosate is needed to feed the world

by Kenneth Keavey

We need glyphosate, it is as simple as that, without it we can’t grow enough food, excuse me?

We never really know what is going on behind the scenes, what is decided and talked about behind the closed doors. We are told things and we need to figure out if it is in our best interests to believe what we are told. For instance, we are told we need glyphosate to produce all the food that is produced in the world. That there would be real trouble if it was banned.

This was exactly the case in 2024, when an exceptionally strong agricultural lobbying group COPA-COGECA successfully lobbied the EU Commission to throw out their pesticide reduction target, this new law part of the EU green deal was formally withdrawn by the Commission in February 2024.

The EU green deal for farmers was going to cut pesticide use in half.

Thomas Waitz A green MEP from Austria said “Copa Cogeca focused on sabotaging, delaying and ultimately stopping the sustainable use of pesticide regulation. They are acting in the interests of large agrichemical and multinationals against the wellbeing of small and medium famers.” The pesticide regulation was withdrawn in 2024.

This organisation set out to protect in particular the use of Glyphosate and the bee harming pesticides neonicotinoids.

This union does represent the rights of farmers, but it represents the rights of some more than others, bigger industrial groups for one.

This same lobbying group (insert link 2) that got an agreement on the extension of the use of cages for chickens for another 10 years. In fact, behind the scenes files captured by “Grilled” (the investigative journalist website)  show this organisation receiving support from EU commissioners in blocking parts of the EU effort to beat cancer, pressuring ministers to weaken protections for wild animals, securing emissions exemptions for factory farms, and prolonging the use of cages for livestock. Using the tactics of large tobacco to lobby, cajole and convince that it is in our best interests as farmers and consumers to do things such as this.   (insert link 1)

One analysis found the EU’s agricultural promotion programme had spent €252 million over four years advertising meat and dairy products, making up a third of its budget.  Imagine if that budget was used for promoting  vegetables!

The EU is now debating a proposal to remove the periodic safety reviews of pesticides always on the market, effectively giving pesticides a carte blanche for ever.

It is safe to say that organic farming is not a perfect system, but it represents a system that attempts to bring farmers back to being guardians of the planet and in so doing creating a more sustainable food system without the use of glyphosate.

Thank you for supporting a different way of growing food.

Kenneth

PS please continue to support us during the difficult summer months if you can, it makes all the difference to our farm, and if you haven’t got your ticket yet for the sustainability festival please click here to get yours.

Link 1

https://www.grilled.media/inside-copa-cogeca-plot-to-kill-eu-green-deal

link 2

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2025/12/pesticide-lobby-instrumentalising-farmer-protests-its-attack-eu-health-regulations-0

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.

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.

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

A cocktail of chemicals on your conventional supermarket apples

by Kenneth Keavey

Did you know we have the most amazing Irish organic apples, they have been grown in country Waterford by Richard Galvin and they have been sprayed with nothing. 

A recent study by PAN UK (pesticide action network UK) found that nearly all the samples of conventional apples they tested had at least one pesticide residue and over 85% had a cocktail of up to seven pesticide residues. In some countries every single apple they tested recorded pesticide residues. 

Many of these chemicals are systemic in nature and get absorbed into the flesh of the apple. 

In a 2022 study carried out by the Irish Department of Agriculture 79% of sampled apples were found to have detectable pesticide residues. Conventional apples are among the most heavily sprayed fruits, often treated with fungicides to prevent scab. 

To maintain freshness and improve appearance, many supermarket apples also are coated with artificial food-grade waxes, such as shellac or carnauba wax, to replace natural waxes stripped away during cleaning. 

Apples are sprayed on average 30 times in a year with a host of pesticides, these toxic chemicals can include neurotoxins which were in this study was found on over 30% of samples. 

The apples we receive from Richard Galvin are amazing, they are Irish and organic, the season is sadly ending soon, but we will continue to have the most delicious organic apples from a Fairtrade organic co-op from the South of France. 

When I was a young lad I used to help my Grandad pick the apples at the end of the summer, he had maybe 10 large old apple trees and it was my job to climb the trees to put up the jars with the water and jam to trap the wasps, and stop them from eating the sweet apples. It was also my job to pick the apples. We used to then store the apples on galvanise sheets in one of the old cow sheds. We would have apples until Christmas, after that they wouldn’t be great. They certainly were never sprayed with chemicals. 

These days with cold storage and special bins that exclude air the apples last until February and much longer and you can be the judge of the quality of our Irish apples yourself. They may not be quite as fresh and crisp as they were back in October, but they are still bursting with flavour. 

As always it is only through your support that we continue to be able to grow food without chemicals and support other Irish organic farmers that share our values, which helps protect nature and our health. 

Thank you

Kenneth

PS Nearly 95% of the apples sold in Ireland are imported.

Maybe we are not as smart as we think we are…

by Kenneth Keavey

Honestly my grandad walked these fields, he farmed here with two farm horses one called Snowball, and he did not use chemicals. The idea struck me just before Christmas that we are the only species on the planet that will actively go out and cover our food with toxic chemicals to stop other living creatures from eating it and then eat it ourselves. That is an amazing forward jump for civilisation, don’t you think?

Using chemicals to ward off disease is as old as organised agriculture, and up until recently bluestone and washing soda, that is Cupper Sulphate and washing soda was used to help prevent blight on potatoes here in Ireland. This is now restricted under organic rules. My Grandad may have used it in the 1950s, and had it been available in the mid-1800s it may have saved millions of people from starvation during the great potato famine, using it would have been the right thing to do.

The key difference today is the scale, the toxicity and the ubiquity of pesticide use. Yes, the EU have been restricting the use of certain pesticides, but it very much looks like their ambition to clean up chemicals in our food will be put on hold for now.

There is also the argument that the dose makes the poison and for something like copper of course if you consume too much of it is toxic, in fact it is more toxic than Glyphosate, this may seem surprising.

But here are two key differences.

1. The use of Glyphosate worldwide is estimated to be 800,000 tonnes annually. For Copper sulphate reliable date does not exist but use is probably around the 10,000-50,000 tonnes mark. (note it is now severely restricted under EU organic standards). Glyphosate is everywhere.

2. Glyphosate is systemic, Cupper is not. Glyphosate gets into the plant and stays there; Copper sits as a barrier on the outside and is easily washed off.

Things are never as black and white as we may want them to be, the famine and the use of copper to protect the potato crop is a good example, if the option was there at the time it would have been the right thing to do to use it.

But today there are clear alternatives to chemical use in vegetable production. For weeding, mechanical and flame weeding are clear chemical free ways to control weeds. Using crops that are more disease resistant is a no brainer, and new varieties are constantly being bred (not GMO, but using natural techniques), take the potato “Connect” which has exceptional blight resistance and tastes great (the earlier Sarpo varieties had great blight resistance, but nobody wanted to eat them!).

For pests, well some crops will succumb that is the nature of nature!

We are often asked how we deal with slugs on our farm, and whilst at times we do use an organic approved slug pellet it is rare and we have virtually no problems. The ecosystem on our farm may be in balance and provides natural protection, as with any balanced system it just works.

So as always without your support we would not be able to continue to fight the good fight, so thank you for standing by us, and Happy New Year.

Kenneth