SUSTAINABILITY Is your harvest table Irish?

Where’s the harvest?


Growing your own
Chris Brown

As we sit down for dinner today, it would be interesting to know what proportion of the meal was
a) Home grown from the vegetable patch or allotment.
b) Produced in Ireland, grown by someone else.
c) Sourced from elsewhere in the world.
Ideally, a reasonable amount of the meal will be from food grown by your own fair hands, supplemented mainly by Irish produce, with perhaps just a hint of food from distant lands to add a little dash. However, I think at this moment in time the opposite is most likely the case, with foreign foods making the majority of what we eat. I also think this will change fairly rapidly as food exports worldwide start to dwindle.
Unless you have a vine growing peppercorns, or access to a salt pan, you will not be able to contribute every single ingredient to the plate, but it’s certainly possible to put the lions’ share there using food that’s been grown in your locality.
August is one of the top months for enjoying the best of local food with potatoes, greens, courgettes, peas and beans, salad leaves, onions and herbs, all in top form, ready to be gathered and eaten. How lucky we are to still have fertile land available to us to bring forth such quality foods, for this isn’t the case the world over.
And let’s not forget blackcurrants, raspberries and eggs, cucumbers, tomatoes and chicken, carrots, turnips and plums; oh yes, we can be responsible for much of what is good to eat.
However, unlike days of the recent past, the milk and butter, cheese, yoghurt and other dairy goodies are unlikely to have come from your own stable or that of your neighbour’s – a whole raft of expensive and restrictive regulations have seen to that, and only those whose mental stability may be in question would think about keeping a milk cow in today’s climate of ‘departmental control’.
I would have thought that seeing as it’s considered best policy (by big charitable organisations) to send a milk cow or goat to regions of the world where food production is a problem, so that people can look after their own needs, the same should apply here at home, but this is not the case.
Currently the lovely milk cow, the ‘Daisy’ of yesteryear, that graced all villages and towns of Europe, has almost, without exception, been forced into factory food production. Not alone has she lost her name and place in the hearts of the many to whom she was important, the milk cow is now part of a fuel guzzling system that anytime soon we won’t have the fuel to maintain!

Where to buy the harvest
Currently, it’s difficult to buy some local garden produce, due, I believe, to the fact there is nowhere to bring surplus crops to. As is the norm of today, we are allowing money, the dirty stuff, to stop us from trading in home-grown foods. Madness!
If I want to sell a few extra cucumbers or lettuce, a fee to the council, a fee to the market organisers and a fee to cover an insurance premium of vast proportions are necessary and this demand for money is bringing almost to a standstill the important function of growing and distributing locally grown food.
Without wanting to sound like a miserable git, to give away glut crops to friends, family and neighbours is not the best policy – it’s ultimately unsustainable and lends to many giving up on the task of growing.
What is needed is an indoor bench or two, in the middle of all towns and villages that anyone can bring their produce to, and get paid for it.

Chris Brown runs Brown’s Farm, a small farm in Louisburgh. He is an advocate of sustainable, natural farming methods and buying local.