GREEN LIVING: We must support our farmers

I GREW up in Kentucky on what my parents used to a call a ‘tree farm’, although the joke was that the trees were never farmed, so we just lived amongst them.
About eight years ago, though, my parents did decide to allow trees to be harvested, before the emerald ash borer made its way to their ten acres and decimated the abundant ash trees totally. A beetle native to north-eastern Asia, the emerald ash borer’s larvae feed on ash species; it was first recorded in the state in 2009. The tree felling has radically changed the farm’s landscape.
(Sadly, the same thing is happening in Ireland with ash. The culprit here is the fungal disease ash dieback, but there are concerns the emerald ash borer is slowly making its way westward from Russia.)
Now, I speak quite often to actual farmers of food for humans in Ireland, as well as importers of organic foods from Europe, and the issues of climate change are massively pressing for them. They are all now having to think in different ways about the way they interact with the land they farm, and whether they can adapt to changing precipitation levels, increasing temperatures and more frequent storms.

Difficult year
AT our Westport store, we buy directly from several grain farmers in Ireland, who grow various varieties of wheat for milled flour and oats for porridge and baking. Unfortunately for all of them, the 2023 season was one of the most difficult in recent years, as average rainfall was very high in periods when farmers would normally be sowing seed, and then quite hot and dry in spring as young plants were growing. Then, the autumn harvest season was exceptionally wet, and some wheat and oats could not be harvested in those conditions and parts of the crop were lost.
Farmers are used to annual fluctuations and some frustrating years, but all of them are concerned about the way that these patterns seem to be becoming more of the rule than the exception.
After working with them to communicate the benefits of Irish-grown grains to customers (fresher and more nutritious for people, less transport emissions, very little packaging, supporting the local economy and more), we are now explaining why we don’t have certain flours available this year.
In other parts of Europe, rising temperatures and prolonged droughts are wreaking havoc on staple crops. Our suppliers of organic olive oils have explained that the situation has been very difficult in Greece, Portugal and Spain for at least two years now, with massively reduced yields that are leading some governments to set minimum pricing and restrict exports.
Italy is the largest producer of rice in Europe and also a leading producer of wheat and maize, as we well as tomatoes for processing into pastes and more. Soaring temperatures in the summer there have also affected the yields of those crops.

What can we do?
WHAT can we do about this? For me, the main takeaway is that we must double down on our support of Irish-grown foods so that we can help our farmers continue to earn a livelihood.
I have personally adapted my baking to use whatever organic Irish flours I can get, and to choose to support anyone who continues to sow and harvest foods for us, such as Glasraí Vegetable Farm in Hollymount here in Mayo, as well as our grain suppliers Oak Forest Mills in Kilkenny, Ballymore Organics in Kildare and The Merry Mill in Laois.

McKinley Neal is the owner of PAX Whole Foods & Eco Goods, a minimal-waste shop in Westport offering bulk organic foods, reusable goods, household products, eco-friendly personal-care items and gifts.