Why we love doing what we do
06/10/2017
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Our organic journey in the West of Ireland, started in 2004, when myself and my wife Jenny moved back to Ireland to take over my grandfather’s farm and start the transformation of the land to organic
Ironically it would have been farmed organically in my grandfather’s time anyway.
But things have changed since my granddads time, today modern intensive agriculture is about producing more and more from less, from pushing nature beyond the point of sustainability.
The “green revolution” introduced artificial fertiliser and the chemical revolution brought the full force of science to bear on a natural system. I am a scientist by training and have worked in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry for give or take 15 years, and I have a healthy respect for science, but the application of the same principles that work in a factory to a living changing ecosystem is very unwise.
The modern agrichemical industry has created a system of agriculture that traps farmers in a cycle of production that is extremely damaging to the environment and is driven by greed and profit for shareholders that are far removed from the earth we farm. Intensive spraying of crops, engineering of plants to tolerate ever higher concentrations of herbicides and selling this to us as the future of agriculture is nothing short of madness and will be our ultimate demise if we do not change.
We blanket apply toxins to crops in fields that are destroying biodiversity and are now showing up in 75% of worldwide honey samples. We engineer animal food crops to enable them to withstand higher and higher concentrations of herbicide, then we feed this artificial highly sprayed feed to animals that are farmed in the most dire factory conditions.
This is the definition of insanity.
Applying the principles of factories to farming demonstrates how far we have strayed from the once skilled art of growing food. Nature cannot be manipulated.
But we can certainly work with it, come and see there is an alternative a sane way to grow, have a look on this wet and windy afternoon at how we do things!
As always thanks for your support
Kenneth
PS We are launching our crowd funding campaign next week, stay tuned we are really really excited about it.
