This week there has been plenty of room at times for few choice expletives and having a bit of a tantrum, especially when it comes to machines. Each year when certain machines leave our farm shed they illicit a sense of foreboding. They put whatever patience we may have remaining, in this business of growing vegetables, to the test.
This was to be the case this week, we have three or four machines that “should” work but often “decide not to comply” with our ideas of what they should do. This week the machine that lays our compostable biolayer took us to the brink of giving up, but right at our breaking point we managed to bend it’s will to our way of doing things!
There is also our planter, it is temperamental, old and cranky and every year there is a requirement to find mutual common ground between farmer and machine, this year that ground has been hard to find and has led to moments of promising our faithful machine that its days are truly numbered. (Of course, we didn’t really mean it, all was said in the heat of the moment!)Nevertheless, if farming has thought us anything and it teaches a lot, is that perseverance is an absolute requirement to succeed no matter what happens. In the end we know we will produce beautiful healthy sustainable food.
But there are some who say organic farming will not feed the world, that it is an idealistic pursuit and just won’t work.I imagine that the same people who say these things are busy buying up the world’s seed bank and patenting the seeds they genetically modify. The same people who make quite a lot of money from selling an idea of how our food system should be and on the back of that selling the chemicals and making quite a lot of money, and in the end gaining control of our food system.
Once a diversified market, Corteva, BASF, Syngenta, and Bayer four enormous corporations now dominate the seeds sector. These industry giants have seized power quickly and currently hold more than half of the seed market. Furthermore, they control almost 67% of the world market for agrochemicals.Did you know four firms or fewer control at least 50% of the market for 79% of the groceries. For almost a third of shopping items, the top firms controlled at least 75% of the market share.Couple that with the fact that four corporations’ control 75% of the worlds global grain supply, and we see that the future of our food, our health and our planet lie in the hands of a few.
We think our food system should not be controlled by the few, and in our own little way we have been doing what we can to make that happen. We have been very busy planting and sowing and supporting other Irish organic farmers that are doing the same. For the last number of weeks we have been planting kale, cabbage, Romanesco, broccoli, lettuce, and celery. We have been sowing, salad, beetroot, spinach, chard, carrots, and parsnips, not to mention the nearly 1000 tomato plants that are finally starting to make some headway.
There is no way to rush nature, we need to have patience and get our timings right, take good care of our crops and the nature around as the crops grow, and the harvest will come.
So, we work, we wait, and we harvest, and we know that sustainable food is our future.As always thank you for your support.
Kenneth
PS Thank you to everybody who took the time to login and place an order last week. Every week with our new system, we are improving and again this week we will have offers and as usual the very best of Irish organic produce anywhere, so please if you haven’t yet do login and place an order. We think you will be pleasantly surprised. Keep an eye on your inbox over the weekend for extra special offers! Thank you so much without you we would not be here.