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He repealed the grocery order, imperfect as it was, it held a competitive norm in place across the entire market.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

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

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

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.

I can’t believe it has been 20 years…

by Kenneth Keavey

This time 20 years ago I had just quit my job in the pharma industry and had started Green Earth Organics. My grandad’s farm was sitting here, my dad was unsure what to do with it, it is a small farm, and it was very hard to conceive how anybody could make a living off 25 acres. 

I passionately believed we should be growing our food without chemicals, and I wanted our food and the food for our family to be free from toxic pesticides. I cannot convey how strongly I believed that farming without chemicals was the right thing to do. I was coming at this with a Ph.D in Chemistry from Cambridge University and nearly 10 years’ experience working in the pharma industry, chemicals do belong in a lab, but definitely do not belong on our food. 

This was at a time before it was fashionable or trendy to grow local organic food. I believed wholeheartedly that our food and our land should be free from chemicals. We believed that our land deserved to be treated with respect, that trees should be planted and wild areas left, that biodiversity should be protected, and that all the other living creatures we share this earth with should be protected and not exploited. Nothing about this belief has changed in 20 years. 

The idea of growing vegetables without Roundup, and in the west of Ireland, without having a clue was deemed in a word “Madness”. Maybe an element of madness was necessary, and it was this madness and the eternal optimism of youth that got us off the ground. So yes, we were mad, totally mad, everybody was leaving agriculture, not getting into it. 

It was the maddest and best thing Jenny and I ever did, we sold our house in the UK, moved back to Ireland, scraped together as much funds as possible, with loans from our parents, credit card debt and the bit of cash we had ourselves, we ploughed it all into the farm. We were broke and didn’t/couldn’t take an income from the farm for the first five years. We lived off Jenny’s wages. 20 years of madness have passed now. 

The founding principles of the business never changed and have never been compromised. Creating a fairer chemical free food system and making this food accessible to all has been our charter and continues to be. We continue to farm, to grow good wholesome chemical free food but priorities changed at least for me from growing food to managing a business. 

At the beginning we had nothing and that was hard, now we have a team of people, we have, loans, tractors, sheds, machinery and a small smattering of experience and knowledge, it is still hard, but the challenges have changed. Since its very modest beginnings in 2006 GEO has grown into the biggest home delivery business of organic 

food in the country with our own farm and a network of other Irish organic farms that we support and buy from each week. 

It has kept on growing (which is positively amazing) and after 20 years I have come to realise that there are no quick fixes to a broken food system. But there is hope, and a growing desire by you our loyal supporters to see a better food system take shape. You are helping turn that into a reality, so thank you for sticking by our side, we hope we can continue on this path for many years to come. 

Kenneth.

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

Feeling a little disillusioned today…

by Kenneth Keavey

You know I discovered something this week, you can be very happy or at least have
a reasonably amount of happiness (whatever that is) doing what you do, but when
you enter financial considerations into the mix, it can change very rapidly.


A lady here at work said to me ‘retail destroys your soul’, and there is a point in that,
it is so hard to compete in the marketplace, especially when it comes to food. If the
truth be told I would be much happier down in an isolated corner of our farm doing
my own thing. That unfortunately will not pay the bills, the fact is farming does not
pay the bills.


This is exactly the truth we seem to have uncovered again this year, after what has
been without doubt the most rewarding growing season of our nearly 20 years of
growing vegetables. Rain when you want it, the best farm team you could hope for,
the best machinery, heat and light when you needed it, the right fertility, it has just
been 85% perfect, we have realised another loss on our farm.
Now let me explain, our farm is like an independent business it needs to be able to


“wash its own face” as it were, and it sells the produce we produce to our retail
business that then sells it on to you, our customers. We pay our farm fairly; it would
certainly be like shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t (and then trying to dig our
own parsnips with one foot). We don’t pay silly prices; we keep it in line with what we
would pay to other Irish suppliers. The reality is this though, that even with this
special treatment we lose money.


I am not highlighting this to be a ‘Moaning Michael’ but to outline what I see as a
bigger problem in our industry. We must at least try to compete with supermarkets,
and supermarkets have made it their model to devalue fresh food to entice
customers into their giant stores by making fresh produce dirt (no pun intended)
cheap. Just the other day I saw Irish carrots in a supermarket for 69c.
So how in the name of all that is Holy is this possible, there is an equation hidden in
there, and it goes a little like this. Either the farmer loses or the supermarket loses
and guess what? The supermarket never loses.


So, I have been racking my brains and a solution to our farming loss might look a
little like.
A. We specialise in one or two crops and sell wholesale.
B. We increase our farm prices beyond what the market allows and then end up
with our retail business losing.
C. We stop growing altogether.
D. We continue as we are and subsidise our farm with our retail business.
The only valid solution in my mind is a combination of B and D, it is sad that this is
the state of affairs, shouldn’t sustainable farming be profitable in its own right? We

are not alone, many farms over the years have closed up shop, there are only 60
field scale vegetable growers left in Ireland, we are one of them.
So, we will keep going, and we look to the next year with hope (Farming can have
this strange hold on you, that you always think things are going to be better next
year…).


Thanks for supporting us
Kenneth

PS The irony of all of this is we feel we need to reduce our prices on key staples to
bring better value to you our customers, because we value you and without you our
farm would not survive. Check out specials here.
PPS Your support this Christmas will make all the difference so please support us if
you can. The supermarkets I guarantee won’t miss you, but if you order with us it
will make all the difference, you can order one of our boxes or and get all your
groceries with us too, we have nearly 800 in stock that you can order for Christmas.

Oaty Apple Crumble

by Nessa Robins

A crumble is by far one of the easiest desserts to make, and this recipe is incredibly versatile too, as any fruit of choice can be used as the base. I’m using a wholemeal fine ground flour, but plain flour can be used in its place. While I’m also adding oats to the topping, but finely chopped nuts can be easily substituted. I find a crumble is best enjoyed warm from the oven, with a good serving of hot custard, but ice-cream or softly whipped cream also make for delicious accompaniments. 

Enjoy!

Nessa x

Oaty Apple Crumble

Ingredients

Crumble

Base

Method

  1. Preheat the oven to 200°C/fan 180°C/Gas 6.
  2. To prepare the crumble, place the flour in a bowl. Add the butter and rub it into the mixture, followed by the oats, almonds, and sugar. Rub the mixture together until it resembles fine breadcrumbs. 
  3. Place the apple pieces in a large ovenproof dish. Add the orange zest and juice, sugar, and cinnamon. Stir to combine.
  4. Sprinkle over the crumble mixture and place the dish on a baking tray. Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 30 minutes, until the crumble topping is golden brown. Take from the oven, cover with some foil and bake for another 10 minutes. Serve with ice cream, softly whipped cream or custard.

I know I bang on about this a lot but…

by Kenneth Keavey

I know I bang on about Glyphosate a lot, in fact I get a bit tired of talking about it. But it just keeps raising its ugly head everywhere I look, and I mean that quite literally.

Thankfully after a year of not being out cycling I am back cycling again, and I see a lot of the local countryside. I don’t know if it is in the budget or something, like the local councils using up their financial budgets before the end of the year, so it is not cut for the next year, of if there are just loads of half empty Roundup cans lying around the place and people feel they need to use them, but there seems to be a proliferation in the use of Roundup on the side of the roads here in Galway. Is it the same where you are? Is this an Irish tradition (one we need to drop may I add) or does it happen in your country too?

Anyway, recently on a relatively long cycle I came across a patch of roadway, up until this point I was really enjoying the countryside, the boreen I was on was beautiful, wild green and just all round lovely, but then all of a sudden, bang, everything was dead, everything. Iridescent horrible yellow, dead grass, trees, bushes, flowers all dead or dying and this wasn’t just a patch in a gate this was I would reckon a good kilometre of roadway maybe more on both sides. It was nothing short of devastating.

So, I ask you why in the name of God, would you do this? I could maybe half understand the logic of trying to increase visibility around a dangerous bend (but surely strimming would be a much more effective method, certainly would be much more environmentally sustainable, and you are much less likely to get cancer) but why on a straight road? Why?

There is no reason on the planet that I can think of to do this, it is just something I cannot get my head round. This is public property so what right does anybody have to go out and spread a probable carcinogenic chemical on our land?

Glyphosate is toxic to land, it is still being pushed by its manufacturers (it is worth billions), it is still being used as standard in tillage and non-organic horticulture, it clears the land prior to planting. This is not ok.

Did you know up until 2023 this systemic (this means it gets absorbed into the plant and stays in the plant) probable carcinogen was sprayed on wheat prior to harvest, prior to milling wheat into flour, prior to using flour in our bread. Thankfully this desiccation of wheat crops has been banned by the EU, thank the EU for that one. This practice is still commonplace in the UK, thank Brexit for that one.

Roundup or Glyphosate is sprayed on Soya, in fact 82% of the worlds soya crop is GMO, and get this, and this is mind blowing, it is genetically engineered to be more resistant to roundup, so more and more glyphosate is sprayed on soya, and guess where all this soya ends up, and no the answer is not vegans!

No, it ends up as animal feed mainly to feed cows, and Irish cows are not immune to munching on GMO, glyphosate drenched soya pellets either. Unbelievably all the packs of nuts for cow’s state if the product is GMO or not, as they say it pays to always read the label, it’s a pity the cows can’t read I guess.

Anyway, on that note if it wasn’t getting too dark (the evening not the blog that is) I would be off for another cycle, but maybe it would be better in the dark, and I wouldn’t see any of those Roundup destroyed verges, and my mind could find peace! 😊

As always thank you supporting our organic family farm and others like us.

Kenneth