Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There was shouting at the radio in Kildare this time last week. We were talking to a number of livestock farmers and the IFA president, Francie Gorman, about what kind of changes to farming a reduction in the cap budget might bring. And on the banks of the Grand Canal, outside the village of Ardcloch, Seamus Bradley thought that everybody was getting it wrong.
His issue was that true food security does not look like a country that exports over 90% of what it produces. He thinks that looks like more people like him being incentivised to produce locally grown fruit and veg to sell to people in the immediate area.
Chapter 2: What challenges do farmers face regarding food security?
So, I paid him a visit.
It has been severely dry here up until now. You can see they're flowering. They shouldn't be flowering because they're only about half the size or even a third of the size they should be. It's nearly stress response. I'd say it'll be okay though now with this rain.
If it comes properly.
Yeah, if it comes properly. But as you can see, it's not really... letting it down much yeah that's just a mixed bit of chard and celery a bit of sweet corn and that's more of a novelty crop than a high value crop because it isn't very productive here just doesn't produce much The plot in its entirety is two acres, but what I'm using here, that's 25 meters, so what would that be across? 40?
Yeah. 25 by 40, thousand square meters, like so a quarter of an acre. And then the tunnel, a bit of space in the tunnel as well. And a few apple trees down behind and a few fruit trees here. But that's the total area.
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Chapter 3: How does local production contribute to food security?
And then I'm producing boxes off this and the tunnels for about 10, 12 boxes from June to February or so. That long?
Yeah. Seven months of the year.
Yeah, well, it was nine months, but... That's pretty impressive now, Seamus. I mean... Well, they'll be getting fed up with beetroot by the end of it, but... LAUGHTER
You're feeding 10 houses for over half of the year off the parts of a two acre plot that you're using. That's not nothing, is it?
No, there's a value in it. I think people like getting the local food and they can get things like the white turnips they can't get in the shops. And the beetroot that you get fresh is completely different from getting a jar of pickled beetroot. And what does a box work out at a week? A weekly box is ā¬20. The only thing is, the model is that they get what I produce. They can't pick and choose.
They can't say, I don't want beetroot, but I'll take extra onions.
So were you shouting very hard at the radio last Saturday?
I couldn't see cap payments going back to being based on a livestock unit. You know, like our headage payment or anything like that. I didn't think that was the way to go.
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Chapter 4: What are the benefits of consuming locally grown produce?
I didn't see that as a way forward. Why not? If there was tomorrow morning diesel, fertiliser, soybean meal stock coming into the country, a lot of that... so-called security would be shown for what it is. It's not true sustainability.
You feel it's precarious because it's reliant on inputs that are coming from outside the country and that are showing themselves to be increasingly unreliable.
Yeah, yeah, I do. And I think small-scale and local production that's not as intensive has a role to play in that security, you know, the food security that is an ambition of not just the Irish government but the EU government.
And when you compare the level of support that an enterprise like this gets compared to those big dairy farms or beef farms Do you feel a little bit cold-shouldered?
People, like large-scale farmers, would dismiss it as a farm at all. It's called a hobby garden, I suppose. And I think I was a bit dismissive of it, and it undervalues the role it plays in not just local food security, but also in meeting sustainability targets and meeting the space for nature requirement and that kind of thing, because...
You know, there's 20% of this plot is space furniture, you know, and that's, you know, very easily attainable, whereas large intensive farmers would have trouble giving over 5%.
They're fairly good at getting them, Nick. They're fairly good at picking the right ones. There's one there. Let's give it a try.
That's a very satisfactory sound, isn't it? And tasty.
Mmm.
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Chapter 5: How does the reduction in CAP budget affect farmers?
So I think there's a number of things that we can be doing and that we are doing, in fact. So Ireland has committed through Food Vision 2030 to become a leader in sustainable food systems. And at the moment, so in terms of repurposing agricultural subsidies, at the moment, globally, we don't have national figures. About half a trillion dollars are spent on supporting agriculture.
And only 15 cents of that goes towards anything that delivers for nature, climate or public health. So we're not spending in a way that nourishes people and planet. So if, for example, one study suggests from Nature Journal, suggests that if we repurposed some of the agricultural subsidies, redirected it towards fruit and veg, by 2030, OECD countries would have approximately 450,000 fewer deaths.
We can spend our money differently, our public money differently.
Sorry, that's OECD countries. Developed countries would have nearly half a million less deaths.
That's right, because it's associated with gastrointestinal cancer, other issues. We're not eating enough fruit and veg. Certainly in Ireland, we could do better in terms of public health there as well. And the action needs to happen at local level, but also at national level.
So very, very big, broad, broad stroke, crude figure. The cap is worth currently, it's going to be worth a lot less, but the cap is worth currently seven and a half billion euro over five years. And we devote 39 million or nearly 40 million of that to organic production. Clearly, there's a little bit of a sort of a rebalancing exercise could go on there.
Yes. So it's where we spend, it's how we spend it. So how and what we value. And this speaks a little bit to what Seamus was saying as well. So if we spend money and we consider value for money in terms of not just the economics, but the environmental and the social, which is really important, again, especially when we're talking about horticulture, but also what we spend on.
And so we have the cap budgets, we have the budgets for agriculture and for production, but we also have budget lines coming from the Department of Agriculture, for example, going to Greyhound Racing, which is at the moment... receiving twice the amount that we're spending on horticulture in this country.
And given the benefits that come from horticulture production versus the questionable benefits of environmental, social and even economic.
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