Suzanne Campbell
speaker
363 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 8 Aug
Suzanne Campbell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Typically in Ireland right now, a hundred cow operation will be spending nine or maybe 10,000 euro a year on the current prices.
Quite previously, they would have been spending about 5,000 euro a year.
With that sort of baseline to continuing to run a diesel tractor in mind, are people convincing themselves that
those that you're talking to, that this is a clever hedge, a clever thing to do now.
Philip Matty in Northampton.
Well, that is good in so far as it goes, but it is very expensive and it won't be any use in the fields doing silage cutting, ploughing, slurry spreading and so on.
But there is a battery-powered answer to both of those questions coming up a little bit later on in the programme.
If our theme this morning is weaning food production and farming off fossil fuels, the thing that needs to be looked at most closely is chemical fertiliser.
It takes the equivalent of six barrels of oil at $95 a day, a barrel, to make a tonne of urea.
And a tonne of urea will get you around one field between 15 and 30 acres, depending on how rich you're feeling.
So when the price gets up to €1,000 a tonne, you can see why it is that it makes farmers wince.
There are, though, ways of farming without any chemical fertiliser, and there are plenty of people doing it.
Yes, they lose a little productivity, but they make massive savings on their fertiliser bills.
Suzanne Campbell went to Leash to talk to Brian Meredith and his father Keith, organic beef and tillage farmers who do what they do with zero fossil fuel based synthetic fertiliser.
Looking at this grass, it's absolutely fabulous.
You're not using any artificial fertiliser.
So what's your routine with your grass growth?
Because we're organic now, we probably have twice as much dung as we had when we were conventional.
Then Dad, they had a dairy farm before, so there was a lot of paddicking.
So it kind of allows us to control the rotation a bit and allows us to grow more grass.
Showing 161–180 of 363 · page 9 of 19
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