I talk to BBC about Ireland and the end of milk quota

The end of milk quota has come and gone. Irish farmers are finally able to sell every litre of milk they produce instead of hiding it in barrels or stuffing it into calves which was what was going on aplenty until Tuesday night last week. 

And it's not just Ireland that's celebrating. The entire dairy farming community of the EU has now entered an unfettered period of milking cows without restrictions. Farms from Slovenia to Sligo are scaling up and anticipating increasing markets for milk. But as we know, success isn't an upwards-only journey. 

In 2009, during the early stages of global markets opening up to Irish milk, prices fell heavily. Many Irish farmers were burned, forced to sell milk below the cost of production. In the UK there are only 10,000 dairy farms left against the 18000 here with a fraction of the population. The dairy sector there has been decimated, with family farms loading their herds into lorries for the factory as cull cows who they've bred on the same land for generations. 

The next few years are going to be interesting to say the least and price volatility is certainly going to be central to this quota-free era.  

Here's an appraisal of this huge shift in farming which I contributed to for BBC news.  

[I do love the BBC form of "Ms. Campbell". At least it's not Mrs. Philip Boucher-Hayes which I get all the time..]

BBC news talk Europe, Ireland and the end of milk quota

"Natural", "Artisan"? - nonsense? Get involved in the discussion on use of food marketing terms in Ireland

This is something that constantly amazes me; I pick up a pack of Danish sausages in the supermarket (often distributed by big Irish brands) who neither state the country of origin or make ridiculous claims of it being a cutsey farm product rather than mass-produced factory food using the lowest acceptable standards, sold at the lowest possible prices. 

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland have announced a public consultation on the use of food marketing terms in Ireland. Words like "natural" "traditional" and "farmhouse" are used liberally on food labels but carry no meaning or no protection in the case where food is actually produced by hand in small quantities. Consumers are confused and many believe that like "organic" these terms carry a defined meaning.

 

As this has been an issue for many years Food and Drink Industry Ireland, (IBEC), the Artisan Forum and Consumers Association of Ireland have now developed the draft code of practice aimed at protecting the integrity of certain marketing terms on food and the interests of consumer and the small food industry.

This Code of Practice outlines the general legal requirements but in addition will provide an agreed set of rules for the food industry concerning the use of the following marketing terms to describe foods placed on the Irish market:

• Artisan/Artisanal
• Farmhouse
• Traditional
• Natural

I know that many people in both the food and consumer sector are concerned with this so now is the chance to have your say.

 

The consultation will run for 8 weeks and the closing date for responses is 14 May 2014. All feedback and comments will be considered in advance of the FSAI publishing a final industry Code of Practice later in the year. To let your opinion be known please check out the following link:

 

http://www.fsai.ie/news_centre/press_releases/National_Consultation_on_the_Use_of_Food_Marketing_Terms_Opens_19032014.html

Pls share and let people know in the small food sector #Irishfood

Lovely Lamb

In my food column this month for The Gloss magazine I write about Spring lamb and a time for learning.

New born lambs are appearing in the fields around our house. This happens just as my friends and neighbours bear the weary eyes of long nights in sheds with bawling ewes, or bottle feeding the unwanted or third in a triplet set in the kitchen.

The valley I live in is mountainy marginal land and has very few cattle anymore. Most of the sheep farms have consolidated into a remaining ten to twenty farmers with their own home farm and sheds, who rent extra land from families that have left farming. Close to us the Hogans, McKees and Keegan's of @waterfallfarm shop are in the thick of the lambing season. In a fickle marketplace it's a business with price rises and crashes like everything else. Sheep are also notoriously tricky to rear and I've witnessed myself the old adage - the first indication of illness in a sheep is mortality. Yet the farmers still stay up all night, both men and women, to lamb ewes, to get the newborn started on feeding and nurse the ones not thriving.

Lambing season here is something both myself and my children delight in. The squeals of delight in response to newly born lambs bucking and skipping on their first day out on grass say it all. It's a pity that as a foodstuff in Ireland we are eating less lamb and it's now purchased by mainly older consumers. I love lamb. I buy half a lamb from the farm across the lane every year and for me it tastes like home.

 

This Edible Life  March 2014

One of my Spring pleasures - holding a new born lamb is unfortunately contraindicated to eating one. Not only are they too cute with their little velvet muzzles, early lamb can have a jelly-like texture and is much better killed at about five months old. While the garden eases into Spring I´m still cooking plenty of dark cabbage and have successfully converted all cabbage sceptics with my fabulous Gnocci with Savoy cabbage and Wicklow Blue or fried off with chorizo and garlic for an easy soup with vegetable stock and cream.

Around Dublin I´ve fallen in love with The Green Bench cafe on Montague Street (as if those pesky Dublin 8-ers aren´t served with enough great spots for a quick lunch). The serve lovingly-made take out for at your desk or if you´re like me - on the run from one venue to the next.  Super moreish is their wrap of citrus marinated feta with avocado, olive tapenade and hummus.

Not far away on Stephen´s Street, P. macs is a more comfy version of the cocktail zinc bars populating the South William street area. There´s lampshades straight from your grandmothers, patchwork armchairs and if you don´t feel like wearing towering heels it’s cosy for a quiet drink in the snug and some decent pizza. Another dress-down hide out for early evening is open downstairs on Dawson street. FAATBAAT serves a multitrip of cuisines – everything from Japanese ramen dishes to Malaysian “Drunken Prawns”. Their Go Go Bar is what this place is all about though with great tunes and decent cocktails.

Always a hot social ticket, the best food producers in the country compete on the 12^th March for a gong from my own parish – the Irish Food Writers Guild. The awards will be hosted by Derry and Sally-Ann Clarke in the wonderful L´Ecrivain. We have some stunning food and drink entries, all Irish artisan-produced but I am sworn to secrecy. Follow the winners and recommendations from the day at twitter @foodguild.

 

No better time than Spring to sharpen cookery skills. To mark her new book The Extra Virgin Cookbook, Susan Jane White is hosting an evening of cooking and tasting at Fallon and Byrne on the 12^th. Countrywide, it´s great to see many people I admire in food offering their expertise. JP McMahon, Michelin-starred chef and owner of Aniar in Galway has day workshops this month in “Nose to Tail Eating” and “The Whole Hen”. Down in Thomastown the inspiring Mag Kirwan is holding classes in smoking at her Goatsbridge Trout Farm.

Close to the beautiful beach at Termonfeckin in County Louth, the Tasty Tart Tara Walker has classes in cooking fresh fish landed at nearby Clogherhead and Foods of the Middle East, timely with the huge popularity of Ottolenghi. If you have a few bob ditch Ottolenghi and go to Beirut, one of my favorite cities for food - figs, hummus fatteh, baba ghanoui… Or closer to home check out Silvena Rowe´s cooking in at Quince in London´s Mayfair Hotel and her gorgeous book Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume: Cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean

The American burger is unsafe to eat. Unless we get our food system in Europe under control we're heading the same direction

[This post is based on an Opinion piece I wrote in the Irish Independent on Saturday, it has been updated to include the latest updates on horsemeat] 

As Irish horse slaughterer B&F Meats was announced on Friday to be re-packaging horsemeat for export as beef, it seems the crisis is back on our doorstep here in Ireland. What we feared might be the case - Irish equines going illegally into the food chain has proved to be true, and there will be further  resulting ramifications for the food sector, let alone legal and perhaps criminal fallout. 

Foods sold in Ikea and Birds Eye are the latest big name brands to find horsemeat in their products. As we are drip fed more information about the scale of the horsemeat problem, Irish consumers feel unsure about what other nasties may lurk in our shopping trolleys.

At the heart the horsemeat issue is the real cost of cheap food. Much of the comment has centred around “if you eat cheap food, well what do you expect?” But

research shows value ranges and cheap food are not just purchased by the 10% of Irish people living in food poverty (Dept of Social Protection). They are bought by ordinary families whose pattern of shopping is based on value and are now worth 46% of our €8.9 billion grocery market.

Food itself has become cheap, and Irish consumers across many income brackets buy own brand or discounted value ranges. This scandal has revealed that it’s becoming harder to pin the problem on simply cheap burgers and consumers are listening to contradictory advice. In between refuting the FSAI’s claims that his burgers tested positive for horsemeat, Malcolm Walker head of retail chain Iceland told BBC this week that he wouldn’t eat other UK supermarket’s value lines as “there’d be other things in there”.

Dumped meat products

The pressure on food to be cheap across the board and moves towards less regulation and testing are at the heart of the problem. As we’re drip fed more brands containing horsemeat, farm ministers in Brussels were wrangling with the CAP budget which pays farmers to produce for retailers at knockdown prices. The EU’s cheap food policy has worked to a fashion – to deliver affordable food to consumers, but how can we say it’s a success when the player closest to the consumer – the supermarkets, are the ones taking the most margin?  Subsidising farmers and paying for proper regulation at least ensures good food quality at farm level. Farmers and farming programmes currently get 42% of the EU budget. It will be less this year and by 2020 set to be reduced to 33%. So as we reduce subsidy, and food gets more expensive to produce, how on earth do we think quality or food safety is going to improve?

As has been asked many times “Why have CAP? Why pay farmers for producing food whatsoever?” Well let’s look at the US, where subsidy exist only for particular foodstuffs like fructose corn syrup which strangely dominates snack foods, food manufacturing and is blamed for America’s obesity epidemic. US is the free market unregulated end of the model. It is also the model with the most problems for those who eat its food.

Tyson Foods

The involvement of American beef giant JBS in the horsemeat crisis is hardly a surprise. Last year one of their biggest beef processors Tyson Foods was found guilty of using false books and bribing meat plant inspectors. US beef contains antibiotics and steroids, and in the opinion of most American food writers the iconic American burger is unsafe to eat.

Massive recalls of beef for ecoli and chicken and salmonella tainted eggs characterise a regular year in the US food chain. Recent research by the University of Minnesota found evidence of fecal contamination in 69% of the pork and beef and 92% of the poultry samples in retail outlets. Factory farming is blamed for large scale antibiotic resistance in the human population while the use of “pink slime" in burgers - mechanically recovered meat treated with ammonia was recently dropped by MacDonald’s in the US after public outcry. 

pink slime filler

Liberalisation of farming and food manufacture has been a disaster for US consumers.  Americans get sicker and die younger than people in any other wealthy nation. Even the best-off Americans – those who have health insurance, a college education, a high income and healthy behaviour are sicker than their peers in comparable countries, says a report by the US National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.

Light touch regulation doesn’t work in food. Under the Tory Government the UK’s Food Standards Agency’s budget has been slashed and food testing fallen in some areas by up to a third. In Ireland we have maintained rigorous tests on farms by the FSAI and EHOs. As food companies become more vertically integrated and dominant, it’s crucial that budget for food regulation and standards in production and manufacture are not only maintained but scaled up in Ireland and the EU.

In recent years the Department of Agriculture insisted in there was plenty of legislation in place for the identification of horses going into the food chain. In the wake of the present crisis I asked if they have plans or budget for more checks at factories and putting vets back on ports? The answer was no.

Regulation and upholding standards on farms, subsidising farmers properly to produce food above the cost of production are essential to maintain a food chain that’s safe. We may not like where we’ve got in our food picture but by further letting go of the reins we will pay for it, in the realm of our own health. 

Hate to say I told you so #horsemeat

One of the frustrating things about Europe's current horsemeat crisis is that welfare groups in Ireland warned the Department of Agriculture many times about the problems of horses being transported live to Europe. These animals were known not to have passports and dealers openly admitted (also documented in the UCD report of 2010) that forging passports to get horses into factories wasn't an issue.

For many years I have helped the Irish Horse Welfare Trust to try and heighten awareness of the neglect of horses and the issue of live transport. For cattle and sheep transported to Europe or elsewhere there are strict regulations on travel times and welfare, none of which exist for horses. Horses are not checked at Irish ports before they travel for health or individual identification. This free movement of horses under the tripartite agreement between England, Ireland and France was identified in the UCD report as detrimental to bio-hazard controls - laughable now we have proof that many of these horses were going for human consumption. Authorities here denied that Irish horses could be going into the food chain until a Dutch processor in Nijnegan was revealed last week to be selling Irish and Dutch horsemeat as beef. This piece of news closed the circle in effect, though it's still not clear whether this meat came from carcasses killed in Irish abattoirs or from the live trade.

www.IHWT.ie

What we also know is that of the five Irish plants who were granted licenses to slaughter horses to cope with the surplus of horses after our boom years, only two are operating horse slaughtering at present. Why? Because there are much larger numbers (the department estimates around 16,000 horses) going out live on lorries to Europe.

horse transport

If 12500 equines were killed in licensed slaughterhouses (excluding the knackery system) here in 2011, why the larger number of animals going for live transport with its additional costs? Think about it. You have to have a passport (albeit very easy to obtain) to bring a horse to a factory here. Not so if it is killed abroad, even in the UK. The USPCA have identified false passports and forged veterinary signatures used on passports of animals going on the live trade, some which have been dosed with bute or other drugs. So of course the numbers are bigger - it's far easier to get them into a factory in Poland or Italy than in Ireland, as loose as the system here is.

I have two horses, both of whom I could apply for a passport for tomorrow from the 12 agencies allowed to issue them and get both into a factory next week. That's no reflection on B and F Meats et al. It is an illustration of how the passport and identification scheme doesn't work. This situation has been pointed out to the department many times - by myself, the IHWT, the USPCA and the SPCAs involved with horse welfare and rescue. The lack of regulation has been boiling under the surface for so long that it comes to no surprise to anyone involved in horse welfare or movement that there is horsemeat in the food chain. Horses are sold in Ireland for as little as 10 euro. Last year I loaded up a horse with an IHWT officer outside Bray that had been stabbed in the shoulder and was living on a piece of scrap land with no feed or water. It had been sold to a 10 year old child for 30 euro. Doubtless, its destiny was a lorry to Europe before we got hold of it.

An IHWT project on urban horse welfare in Limerick

What has been of little mention throughout this debate is the welfare issues involved here. Horses are put on lorries that are injured, about to foal or dying. Can you imagine the hellish journey these animals go through without food or water to be slaughtered in hellish conditions like those filmed by hidden cameras at the UK abattoir.

What the horsemeat scandal has revealed is there is overwhelming problems with the equine identification and movement system. Vets need to go back into ports, and the passport system enforced. Having a scheme in place is nonsense without enforcement.

These points were put to the Department of Agriculture's chief veterinary office Martin Blake on Primetime by broadcaster Claire Byrne and myself in a segment on the horsemeat issue. It seems there is little admission of the scale of the problem or how long it has been going on for. All I can hope is that recent events will speed up the will to look again at the tripartite agreement. Something radical needs to happen about the welfare and slaughter issues at the heart of this trade, let alone the dangers for us humans the consumers. You can view the segment at the link below.

http://www.rte.ie/news/player/prime-time/2013/0218/

The horsemeat in burgers scandal. Are we consumers partly to blame?

We consumers. We love cheap food

Oh how we love cheap food, but then gasp in amazement that it might contain something unpleasant. This week’s shock discovery of horse DNA in Irish burgers grabbed headlines around the world. But are we, the consumers also to blame for this debacle?

Our lust for a bargain has been mirrored in the advancing market share captured by Lidl and Aldi in Ireland – we’ve fallen in love with the low-cost German model. At a recent dinner party several well heeled guests boasted how they’ve halved their grocery bill by going to discounters. I replied that Aldi is a great buyer of Irish food – purchasing everything from Aberdeen Angus beef, sparkling water, artisan cheese and yoghurts for its own brand range. Food producers whisper to me that Aldi pay on time with “no messing around”. They’re only too glad to board the German steamroller.

Meat processing for burgers

Yet our desire for cheap food and the lengths the food chain will go to supply it are central to how horse DNA got into our burgers. Supermarkets want profits up, share price up and they do this by driving prices down. Their goal is to pay suppliers as little as possible including those who process beef. But like any product, food has a bottom line from where it can be produced or not. Below that line cost-cutting can put consumers at risk. For this very reason I’ve campaigned at Oireachtas Committee level for a supermarket ombudsman to ensure farmers and food producers can produce our food cleanly and safely.

Irish beef at its best; grass fed and highly traceable

Last year Monaghan chicken farmer Alo Mohan told me they made 56 cent on every chicken. These same chickens are then retailed as low as 2.99 by the supermarket. How can a living breathing animal which has been nurtured, fed and cared for from birth to cost less than a cup of coffee?. And if the farmer is getting 56 cent out of a 2.99 – who is taking the largest cut? The supermarket.

Chicken farmer Alo Mohan

But who’s driving this? Us the consumers.

It may come as a surprise that food prices in Ireland are in fact artificially low and far lower relative to the UK. Since 2005 food prices in the UK have increased by as much as 35%. By comparison, Irish prices are just 3 to 4 per cent above their level of seven years ago despite the euro area as a whole increasing by 15%. In this same period, the price of oil and grain has made the cost of producing food explode. In Ireland, recession and weak consumer demand has kept the supermarkets in razor sharp competition, trying to keep the price of food low despite production costs rising.

As our incomes shrink and bills dropping onto the hall floor are ignored for days no one wants to go out and pay a whopping amount on groceries. But in our desire for value we can end up with products like the supermarket spaghetti bolognese I examined containing just 16% meat. What on earth is in the rest? Most likely what are called food “extenders” and “fillers”.

Extenders and fillers are used to add volume and taste to sausages, burgers, ready meals and any amount of things in our trolleys. They arose from the need to produce lower cost food and can reduce costs by 10-30%. This week our Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney described the ingredient that carried horse DNA into the Irish burgers as powdered beef-protein additive – a filler used to bulk up cheaply produced burgers.

"Pink slime" was commonly used in US fast food chains

Also common is mechanically separated material from animal carcasses known as mechanically deboned meats (MDM) where meat on bones is ground and processed into a product that then goes into other foods. You might remember the unpleasant “pink slime” story which broke in America recently. This MDM (resembling pink ice cream) was found in many fast food chain burgers. But once it was exposed that ammonia treated to “clean” the slime, fast food chains boycotted it in a desperate bid to calm consumers.

Most of this intense manufacturing takes place in Europe and looks to like the source of our imported horse DNA problem. It’s frustrating that Ireland has the best food ingredients in the world with demanding standards on food safety and traceability. Yet somewhere an ingredient manufacturer has cut costs, or deliberately defrauded other manufacturers and consumers. You won’t find many other countries doing the type of DNA tests the FSAI carried out on meats because frankly they would be too scared about what it might reveal.

What needs to happen quickly is identifying and punishing the supplier who sold this tainted ingredient into Irish burgers. In 1999 the Belgian dioxin crisis cost Belgium 625 million euro and the prime minister his job. Yet the Belgian father and son who knowingly sold machinery oil into animal feed causing widespread PCB poisoning received ridiculous suspended sentences of two years. The penalty for messing up the food chain should be an enormous headline-grabbing event to match the damage done by the event itself. Horse DNA in Irish beef burgers is not acceptable. Who is going to take up the tab for the damage done to our own food sector and jobs?

So what can we do to eat safely and not pay out a fortune? The answer is keep your food chain short and keep things simple. And let’s be honest, this takes work. But putting a small bit of thought into what I buy makes me feel safer about what I feed my children in particular. I buy my meat and vegetables from local shops in the village. I buy store cupboard foods in one big shop about every three weeks in either Superquinn or Aldi picking brands and suppliers I know and trust. Kidney beans, tinned tomatoes, butter beans, chick peas, chilli flakes and herbs are all imported products, my trick here is to buy what has the least added ingredients and cooks well.

If you only want to shop in the supermarket always buy Bord Bia approved beef, pork, chicken and sliced meats for kids lunches. I’ve been on these farms, seen the processing and this is the highest level of auditing in food you’re going to find. I never eat ready meals but cook my own – cottage pies, ratatouilles, warming chillis and soups, freezing half for another day.

Preaching only to buy local and artisan goes over most consumers heads and budget. But buying less complicated foods and ingredients is one way to bypass the extremes of food manufacturing. Remember horsemeat is also present in many snack foods and crisps sold on European supermarket shelves. The more processed something this, the more surprising the ingredients are on the label. Keep things simple is the key, buy Irish and above all enjoy your food. Our food sector employs 200,000 Irish people, let’s hope it can weather this storm. 

What exactly is a Christmas ham and what's the best way to cook it?

Wet sloppy nightmare or artisan luxury bliss. If you plan to buy a Christmas ham this year here's a few pointers

Firstly what exactly is a ham?

A ham is hind leg of a pig from the femur to the hock. The word gammon derives from the Old Northern French word jambe for hind-leg, and gammon may also be used to refer to a ham or bacon. The depth of meat to the bone is greatest at the top of the hind limb; cutting this piece away from the bone and curing it separately does the job thoroughly and easily. This cut is the original and to this extent authentic form of gammon, though the name is often applied to any round ham steak. Gammon is usually smoked.

What is a free range ham?

Organic ham implies that the pigs are reared in a free range way but there are also many free range producers who don’t feed organic feed and therefore just sell “Free range” pork. New guidelines have been drawn up between the Irish free range producers pig group and Bord Bia and a mark will soon be available to consumers. The prices for free range will generally be higher but believe me, it does taste more flavoursome.

So you’re out rushing around for your Christmas food shop. Why is it important to look at where the ham is from?

Finely sliced ham

Imported European hams have more water and nitrite content allowed. Dutch processors can put up to 17% brine into their meat but only about 10% is allowable here. So an imported ham or packet of rashers that cook down to half their size mightn’t be worth the cheaper price on the supermarket shelf. In the USA a new study in the US found 69 percent of raw pork samples tested positive for yersina a lesser known but serious foodborne pathogen. Countries with less strict food regimes than ours are not worth buying cheap meat from.  

What goes into a ham?

Wet-cured bacon is prepared by immersing sides of bacon in brine or by injecting brine into the meat. It’s popular with manufacturers as it’s a faster and cheaper way to cure, but it has downsides for flavour. The final product is allowed to have up to 10% brine by weight, leading to shrinking on the pan. When you see a white liquid come from your rashers, that’s the brine and is a sign they have been wet cured.

You should be able see the grain of the muscle 

By contrast, dry-cured bacon is rubbed with a mixture of salt and sugar in various proportions and they are given time to cure the meat, taking about 7 days. Some producers will say there really is no such thing as nitrate free ham has pork can only be cured with nitrate. (Some use dried celery extract which has high concentrations of nitrate).  It’s a slower and more labour intensive process but it results in a drier finish and fuller, more pronounced flavour. This is the way meat was cured prior to it becoming an industrial process. You’ll benefit not just from a much better taste, but because there will be less shrinkage during cooking and it is easier to get a nice crisp result.

What’s the best way to cook it?

Choose the right sized ham e.g. a 4kg fillet of ham will feed 10 people and allows a little extra if your family like to help themselves to more on Christmas night. Never!!

Cook the ham on Christmas eve – it takes the pressure off the next day

Weigh the ham and put in a pot with half water and pure apple juice if you have it or a bay leaf, bouquet garni, orange peel or cider

Bring to the boil and simmer for 30 minutes per pound. Some people change this water or soak the ham then fully roast it. If its dry cured it doesn’t need soaking.

Honey and spice glazed ham

Next day, remove skin and score the meat crossways with a sharp knife. Apply your preferred glaze. Honey, mixed spices with cinnamon and cardamon is one of my favourites. A lot of people will put cloves in the ham, a jerk or Caribbean glaze is gorgeous but seriously hot.

You can warm the ham before putting on the glaze. Apply the glaze and put it back in the oven for another 20/30 minutes. (This can all be done while your turkey is resting.)

Do not throw the cooking water out. It can be used to keep the ham moist when roasting in the oven. 

All important - what price should you pay?

Supermarkets –

Lidl have hams from 4.99 a kilo to 7.99 a kilo a gammon and a loin, Irish produced

Dunnes stores cooked ham 4 kilos Bord Bia 50 euro (12.50 a kilo)

Dunnes Stores Dry cured Irish gammon joint 1.9 kilos 19.99 euro

Free range/small producers

www.crowesfarm.ie - outdoor reared dry cure hams and organic dry cure hams, both boneless.

Their Outdoor Reared hams are €9 per kg and the organic are €12.99 per Kg.

Can courier direct to your door, final courier delivery day for Christmas is Dec 22nd and courier is free for orders over €100, below that it's €10..

www.Termonfeckindelicious.ie (I so love that name) – dry cured 13lb (nearly 6 kilos) boneless ham 45 euro. Whole ham on the bone 40 euroBottom of Form

www.Jack McCarthy.ie award winning Kanturk butcher 4 kilos free range boned –

34 euro

www.oldfarm.ie  €14.50 per kg, free-range, gmo free, natural brine cure.  Delivered to your door!

Here's a link to a radio piece I did with Pat Kenny this week on ham (its an hour and 6 mins into the show) and whatever you do, eat plenty of ham this Christmas. 

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/todaywithpatkenny/2012-12-06.html 

Can foodies and commercial farming co-exist?

Savour Kilkenny organisers you know who you are. Again; a great festival. Again I return home so stuffed with gorgeous local food I roll out of my car on arrival, replete with foodie gifts for just about everyone except the dog.

What stood out for me about this year's festival was the inclusion of John Bryan from the Irish Farmers Association on the Foodcamp panel where I was also speaking. As someone with a foot in both camps, I feel the food world and the farming world frequently revolve around each other like two suspicious planets. Rarely do they have an opportunity to meet, engage in discussion or put to bed misunderstandings that exist between the two sectors. The GM issue has polarised this with many foodies and food groups now pretty angry with Teagasc and the IFA. Many also oppose the general idea of commercial farming which they feel is overfond of GM animal feed and supports a liberalisation of GM technologies in Ireland.

In fact the position of both sides is far more complex than this, but you wouldn't believe this unless you talk to the people involved. And that's the problem, many foodies never meet anyone who farms and most farmers have scant time to talk about the eating quality of a white truffle from Piedmont or what Rieslings they particularly enjoy.

Speaking on the Kilkenny Foodcamp panel last Thursday I suggested both worlds have a lot to learn, and more importantly to gain from each other. The IFA are superb lobbyists and have access to Simon Coveney our Minister for Agriculture and Brussels in a way that leaves the artisan and small food sector far behind. Yet both are singing from the same hymn sheet. Irish cheeses and artisan products are the shop window that sell our clean green image to the likes of Sainsburys and Danone. Big food can exist with small food, but unfortunately I often find myself the only person in the room saying this.
So kudos to Mag Kirwan and the organisers of the festival for including the IFA. As Mag said herself during the panel discussion "I hate the word artisan. And you won't make money making produce at your kitchen table". Her business Goatsbridge Trout had to grow to be successful. Others can remain small and still make money. What's important is that there remains a no size fits all mentality to the food sector in Ireland. Those that are very big or very small are not necessarily in opposition to each other. Yes we have to be careful that Harvest 2020 means sustainable production and that Ireland steers away from a factory farm model. But the only way in ensuring that is that the farming and the food sector shares more common ground and starts talking to each other like the example of what happened at Kilkenny. So, what about it lads?

Irish poultry firm closes, Nando's announce new openings, with chicken from Northern Ireland

News has emerged today that Cootehill Farms, also known as Co-Operative Poultry Products Ltd in Cavan is to close with the loss of 90 jobs. It comes at a time when chicken producers and processors are under incredible pressure to deal with the spiraling cost of animal feed which is making business for some, unsustainable.

The company had been trading in County Cavan, the centre of Irish poultry production since 1949. The 25 farmers who supply chicken to the plant have also now lost their source of income and will need to get contracts with other processors fast, or go under. I've written extensively about the Irish poultry sector on this blog and pointed out many times that unless we eat Irish chicken, we won't have an Irish poultry sector. Cheap imports particularly in food service are killing the Irish trade, also loose chicken on butcher and supermarket counters coming in from Eastern Europe or as far as Thailand, sometimes bed and breakfasting (often with some kind of bulking out processing) in the EU to attain an EU origin stamp.


On the same day we hear of the Cootehill Farms closure, Nandos, the global chicken giant (think Kentucky Fried Chicken with a zestier twist) announces it's opening two new restaurants in Blanchardstown and Liffey Valley shopping centres. These outlets will employ an additional 100 people and bring to seven their number of Irish restaurants. Nandos is a South African success story - originally set up in 1987 it has become a family-friendly dining-out giant, with 850 branches worldwide. And guess where they get their chicken from? Moy Park in Northern Ireland.

Moy Park are also a huge food success story but they are one of the reasons small producers in the Republic cannot compete. Their scale is enormous, they have 13 separate processing facilities in Northern Ireland, England, France and Holland. This year Moypark - owned by the Brazilian food giant Marfrig, posted annual sales of £1.07 billion. You can argue the 32 counties is still Ireland but it's not that simple. We gain none of the revenue in tax from this business nor a cent of the profits which go back to Brazil. Even Irish large-scale poultry businesses such as Vincent Carton's Manor Farm is finding it hard to compete with giants like Marfrig. With feed prices going ever upwards, the retail sector is also bearing the cost. But the view of Irish farmers and operators in the sector is that if consumers are prepared to pay for Irish chicken the present storm can be weathered out and we can still have a viable industry.

I talked to Dublin restaurateur Joe Macken (Crack Bird, Jo Burger, Skinflint) about this recently. He still buys chicken from the Republic for his string of eateries as he feels strongly that if we don't, we'll have no Irish chicken supply left and only ourselves to blame. He is also having to pay a lot more for his Irish chicken as the processors ask their customers to take the brunt of the hikes they're having to pay farmers to keep business sustainable. And what's the root of that? Drought in the US, Ukraine bans on wheat exports and spiraling costs in compound feed ingredients that are completely beyond Ireland's control.

So what's your view folks? Time to put our money where our mouth is or pay for it later?

See also - my extended piece on the issue last year in The Irish Times -

basketcase: Irish chicken, the end of the road?

Sustainability. Sounds green, woolly and warm but what does it really mean for the Irish food sector?

This week in the Irish Farmers Journal I wrote about what sustainability programmes can yield to food producers. Sustainability has been a buzz word bandied around liberally in the past decade. Unfortunately it has also been frequently abused by many food retailers and manufacturers.

More recently the term has gained renewed focus as commodity prices move sharply and continuously upwards. The scramble for land in developing countries to feed our Western appetites has become a contentious issue. Here in Ireland our chief food and drink marketing agency Bord Bia has put a sustainability programme into place. In the following analysis I spoke to farmers, Bord Bia and outside voices on what issues are involved. Of huge importance to farmers is looking at the costs of more form filling against the benefits that may come in the door in terms of farm income.
So what are those benefits? Is sustainability just a word for lovers of open-toed sandals? Or is it a way of farming in Ireland that could yield us huge benefits in the future.


Greening the Shamrock; where’s the pound, shilling and pence?

Irish Farmers Journal Suzanne Campbell, 18th October 2012

Bord Bia’s Origin Green scheme had its “soft launch” earlier this summer; promoting sustainability as something far from green and woolly but as a hard business strategy for Irish food exports. As Ireland’s clean food image is already a seller, what does ticking more boxes on waste and emissions mean for Irish farmers? Is greening the shamrock a strategy that works for big food, or can tracking sustainability create rewards that will filter down to Irish farm incomes?

Sustainability is safety, and Ireland’s track record on extensive production could be worth more than we bargained for in a resource-strapped world under pressure to meet demand for food. With a population of nine billion the global marketplace is a huge opportunity for Irish exports. But it’s also placing pressure on basic but limited resources like water and land.

The new scramble for Africa is about land for growing food, and supplying Western diets from developing countries creates complex issues. Ethiopia which farms baby corn and mange tout for the UK and Ireland has suffered renewed hunger this summer after drought. According to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, hedge funds and other speculators bought African farmland the size of France (over 210,000 square miles) in 2009. He attacked the growing practice of “land grabbing” by which countries are buying or leasing land in other nations to increase their own food security.

Food companies cannot afford to be labelled as unethical in terms of where their food is produced and they also need to make sure that the bottom won’t fall out of supply chains. This is where Ireland steps up to the plate; we’ve plenty of rain, good grass and we’ve just began tracking exactly what’s going in and out of the system.

In May of last year Bord Bia began auditing use of water, energy, waste levels, animal feed and production practices on Irish farms. Beginning with farmers in their Beef Quality Assurance Scheme, so far 30,000 members or 94% of QA producers have participating in the sustainability survey; the first national assessment of environmental performance of farms worldwide.

One of the farmers involved in the auditing is Richard Hogge who farms sheep and sucklers in Stonyford County Kilkenny. He views the scheme as worth getting involved in, despite the additional workload. “There’s a fair bit of trust and honesty on the farmer’s part as you’re putting in all your details and costings, so I had to gather all that. Then it’s processed at the Bord Bia end and I get a chart coming back to me outlining how my farm is performing on the different elements.”

For Richard there were obvious rewards in seeing how profitability could be improved. As he has 350 ewes on the farm and 25 sucklers, it was clear from the feedback that his grass could be better utilised by cattle but it didn’t suit his sheep enterprise. “I could have shorter time with cattle indoors but as I need my grass for sheep outdoors all year this is difficult to improve on. At the same time I compared well on how I’m finishing my animals – little outside purchased concentrates, and I’m also getting a calf per cow every year. If I considered a continental bull I might get more kilos per hectare but might lose out on the better calving ratios and fattening from my Angus bull. I’m getting the heifers away at 18 months and the bulls away at 20-22 months off grass. So it’s a balancing act.”

Richard came into the scheme from his involvement in Bord Bia’s quality assurance schemes for his sucklers and sheep. “This was thrown in front of me as an option and for me it wasn’t a hard choice as I’m involved in nearly everything that can be done to improve my lot. For farmers there’s an advantage that it’s showing you what can be improved with what you’re doing, and ultimately that’s saving money ”.

Some of the top farmers taking part in the sustainability programme were rewarded at the Ploughing last week in New Ross by Bord Bia, The Irish Farmers Journal and Teagasc for efficiently producing cattle at a suitable specifications for export. One of these winners was Michael Murphy from Nenagh for his dairy calf to beef production. In a business where profitability can be tricky, Michael found the auditing gave him an outside eye on productivity on his farm.

“When the charts came back, compared to the national average I was up there near the top which made me think I was doing everything as near as good as I can. At first I didn’t know much about carbon footprint and it is difficult for farmers to understand. Sometimes they don’t think about details and may not have any plan in their head about when they’re going to slaughter what they buy.”

For Michael tracking every last figure is the only way his business works. The 200 calves he brings in yearly are fed by machine which communicates with the calf’s electronic tag. He also weighs them every two months.

 “There is a definite time span for any animal I have, you need to keep animals moving along and putting on weight everyday. I can’t understand lads not weighing cattle, I suggested a weighing scales at a discussion meeting and they called it a luxury, for me it’s essential. Overall I found the experience a good one, and if other farmers are thinking about it it will improve their efficiency without doubt.”

Jim O’Toole at Bord Bia was one of the driving forces of the sustainability monitoring, previously working on the Quality Assurance schemes. Quality Assurance has been a huge success for the marketing of Irish food, and customer feedback shows shoppers identify with traceability and “safe food” assurance. But why the move into the more “open-toed sandal” area of sustainability? For O’Toole it was a natural progression from the monitoring they were already doing.

“We did work that was completed in 2009 with some of the bigger customers of Irish food – food service, retailing and manufacturing to see how important sustainability was and we concluded it was an important issue. Our natural production in Ireland would resonate with that perception, but what we felt was that companies wanted more evidence.”

Bord Bia returned to the topic in 2010, asking respondents again about sustainability. Instead of falling in importance as recession dug in, it seemed sustainability had hardened in importance. For customers of Irish food and particularly beef and dairy, sustainability was now on the slate of key words and concepts, but what was driving the impulse for food buyers?

“The debate about sustainability is often described as a triple bottom line – environment, financial and social” says O’Toole. “If there isn’t a financially sustainable supply chain that supply chain could break down. There is also benefit from efficiencies by improving their environmental performance in terms of reducing waste, energy etc so there’s a cost saving there as well as enhancing brand value”

The scale of ambition of Origin Green is huge. To date 27,500 of Irish farms have had a carbon footprint assessment done. 45% of Irish export food and drink production has signed up to the scheme; retailers, food service operators, manufacturers, Unilever, Nestle, McDonalds, Danone and Tesco are already involved. For retailers like Sainsburys with their “20 things for 2020” strategy, auditing our own sustainability on Irish farms can’t fail to be an attraction as it means someone else doing the hard work for them. It’s a move that has put Ireland ahead of the pack, potentially yielding us a competitive advantage.

But farmers might ask - if retailers are so interested in sustainable food chains, why don’t they just pay farmers more? Would Tesco’s investment of £25 million in the Sustainable Consumption Institute at University of Manchester be better spent rewarding extensive farming systems we already have. Sustainability is clearly a great buzz word for retailers and at the corporate table, but where or when is the payback?

“It’s too early to tell” says O’Toole. “The cheap food debate isn’t one that isn’t going to get settled very quickly but from our experience with this programme the buy in we are getting from farmers it means Ireland can secure markets in the future. What we’ve got to do is prepare our industry to compete and win business so it’s a strategic long term initiative.”

Padraig Brennan, senior information analyst with Bord Bia has been working with Teagasc and understands that Origin Green needs to appeal at farm level. “There’s no point in being environmentally sustainable if you can’t make a living out of it. Being sustainable comes down to getting more output from the same input, more beef and more milk on a daily basis – a combination of management, genetics, and using resources on farm.”

As it stands, many food companies aren’t making demands on suppliers in terms of sustainability but as Padraig points out, it’s about Irish producers getting in before the rest of the posse. “We are putting structures in place so rather than waiting for when it happens and being forced into certain things, we’re being proactive in this area and creating that point of differentiation.”

But how important is sustainability to our European customers of Irish food? Marine Digabel, a journalist with Agra Alimentation in Paris came to Ireland this month with a group of European food industry writers, visiting Richard Hogge’s farm and the Glanbia plant in Ballyraggart. “In France there is a real interest in sustainability but  after the French election,  local food and French jobs have become more important.”

With financial woes being felt among France’s retailers and consumers, several things are happening in their grocery market. Apart from poultry, meat consumption is decreasing overall but organic meat is growing its share. Sustainability may have been overtaken by local, but as it makes sense to bottom line, it’s a strategy not being ignored among large French companies like Danone.

“Definitely they are all working towards less energy, less carbon, less waste” says Digabel “probably not because they’re deeply interested in environment but its more about reducing costs all along the chain.” Does getting on the sustainability train early create advantage for Irish producers?  “I don’t know if the Origin Green programme in Ireland will make people switch from one supplier to another. But it might make them more tempted to change. Definitely simply the fact that it’s measured – that companies know they’re working with people who have quality assurance and traceability and tracking the environment, is good for a long term perspective.”

Padraig O’Donnell agrees. Auditing sustainability is about creating solutions for customers of Irish food who may not be ready now, but will need assurances on sustainability in the longer term. “We explain to buyers what the programme is and what it’s trying to achieve. As we get more food and drink manufacturers on board we want to show commitment from a 3-5 year plan and also roll out advice at farm level. We want the companies who are supplying them with product to show the targets they have achieved. A lot of these customers have set out targets to reduce energy, waste targets here and they want their suppliers to help them meet those targets.”

Whatever way the food market moves, Ireland is better off one step ahead than one step behind. We mightn’t have valued it twenty years ago but the homogeneity of our production systems is something other countries have now bypassed, making branding themselves sustainable more difficult. “It’s definitely quite easy for Ireland to set up a programme like this as you have extensive grazing” says Marine Digabel. In northern France it’s similar to Ireland but in some places we have intensive production so there is huge disparity. The same scheme in France would be difficult to implement as you are saying “this type of production is better than another”.

“For me the material payback is in lowering costs” says Richard Hogge. “It’s no good to me unless I can improve profitability, the farm I’m running is a business not a charity. For scheme for me has pointed out where money can be saved without affecting the environment. It’s like bringing the euros and the farm along together.”