Lough Carra Catchment Association to hold November meeting

The Lough Carra Catchment Association will hold its next public meeting at 7.30 pm on Tuesday, November 19 at the Belcarra Community Centre. 

The association is very pleased to welcome guest speaker Donal Sheehan, a dairy farmer from the Bride Valley in East Cork. 

Mr Sheehan played a pivotal role in establishing the BRIDE EIP Project, funded by the Department of Agriculture and the European Union. 

His journey from an intensive dairy farmer to a biodiversity champion offers an inspiring perspective on sustainable farming and environmental stewardship. 

Mr Sheehan l manages a herd of 70 cows at Blossom Farm near Castlelyons. In the 1990s, he followed the typical practice of intensive farming, but his outlook shifted when he began keeping bees. This experience opened his eyes to the vital role of nature on his farm.  

Since then, he has transformed his approach, actively working to lower nutrient inputs, reduce chemical sprays, conserve water, and enhance biodiversity.  

Mr Sheehan now endeavours  ‘to push the boat out all the time trying to make farming more sustainable, farming with nature rather than against it’. 

He describes this as a more rewarding way to farm and has dedicated a proportion of his farm to biodiversity including ponds, pollinator strips and wild bird cover for overwintering birds. 

Ireland’s dairy expansion is an impressive economic success story, but it has brought significant environmental challenges. The BRIDE Project (Biodiversity Regeneration in a Dairying Environment), which ran from 2018 to 2023 tackled these issues head-on. 

The core concept of the BRIDE Project is that every farm and every farmer is different, and the Project took an innovative, farm-specific approach, focusing on the unique habitats of individual farms. 

Farms were mapped to estimate their Space for Nature, and a Farmland Biodiversity Index was created to reflect the quantity and quality of biodiversity on each farm. 

At the start of the project, Mr Sheehan noted that shifting farmers' mindsets has been the biggest challenge. He explained that, in the past, farmers were often encouraged to cultivate every available inch of land, and said that ‘every farmer is connected with nature, but that connection was broken when we got intensive, we need to find a middle ground, leave room for nature’.  

The scheme has since been a huge success, operated at full capacity, and demonstrated that intensive farming and biodiversity can go hand in hand.

Additionally, Mr Sheehan has submitted a petition to the Houses of the Oireachtas, drawing attention to the urgent challenges facing the dairy farming sector. He points to the mounting pressure on farmers to increase production, often amid diminishing financial returns, and cautions that this relentless ‘more for less’ approach is placing a serious strain on the environment. 

In his petition, he calls for an overhaul of the current low-cost production model, which he argues is largely driven by processors and retailers, compromising both farmers' autonomy and ecological sustainability. 

You can hear more of his inspiring story at the upcoming Lough Carra Catchment Association meeting this November. Everyone is warmly invited to attend.