Glastonbury for farmers. "The Ploughing" - what's it all about?

Ireland's Glastonbury for farmers began today in New Ross, County Wexford. It was a very rainy day by all accounts and the forecast doesn't look much better for the rest of the week. Weather aside, by the time the week is out 200,000 people will have visited the event. For those of you stumped by the whole idea of "the Ploughing", here's a little explainer:

The National Ploughing Championships began as an event where farmers could compete against each other at tractor ploughing and horse ploughing. This involves ploughing furrows in very straight lines, turning over the soil in an even level fashion and loads of other tiny details that are followed very closely by the spectators and judges watching the actual ploughing matches over the three day event. Ploughing enthusiasts first compete at county or regional level and then make there way to the finals which is "The Ploughing". Women also compete and there are still very popular classes for those who compete with horses.

The event has now grown into one of Europe's biggest outdoor events with over a thousand exhibitors. Farm machinery, equipment suppliers, feed merchants, pedigree animal associations, farm organisations, food companies, homeware businesses, builders, car dealers, banks, political parties all exhibit at the event - selling their wares or ideas in a massive series of tented villages that makes the old Spring Show in the RDS look like a children's party. The scale of it is truly massive. There are hundreds of lanes and walkways between the tented stands with tracked surfaces to keep the mud out and plenty of things to catch your eye, whether its a new range of waterproofs or a deLorean tractor costing half a million euro.

Most farming and rural people go to the ploughing every year and look forward to it as a bit of an annual shindig. Despite its massive size you continually run into people you know and spend a long time updating on news and gossip therefore missing half the events you went to see in the first place. When we used to film there for Ear to the Ground I viewed the entire event as one long nightmare. We could never do a piece to camera without the presenters being jumped on by eighty kids and people going crazy in the background. Ten takes later and a very stressed Mairead McGuinness and cameraman, valium was truly in order. We also had a selection of camera malfunctions because of incessant rain and clothing that literally never recovered from three days at the event. To go to the ploughing and not to film there for me is the greatest of pleasures.

If you're interested in farming or food try and get down to see it. Many urban people come back from the ploughing dazed and confused mumbling "it's a different world down there". If you're not familiar with the size of a Belgian Blue's arse or ever stood close to a modern combine harvester yes it is probably a bit alien. But this is the livestock and machinery central to our farming success. Everybody at the ploughing has a role somewhere in the rural economy, or an interest and passion in farming and the food chain.

This year the event is in New Ross County Wexford. The ploughing used to be in a different part of the country every year but recently has tended to stay at one site for several years which helps general logistics. This year I plan to head down on Thursday to meet some friends, colleagues and have a look at the pedigree cattle. Their calm amid the massive crowds always impresses and they are beautiful animals, often the unusual breeds such as Pietmontese, and beautifully presented by their farming owners.

The ploughing is not just an event where you'll see the great and the good shaking hands and currying favour, it's primarily a celebration of how important farming is to Irish life, and what's more if you've kids, they will thank you forever for taking them. For more check out www.NPA.ie

Avian flu back in the UK?

While I hate scaring the horses, the death of a patient in London from suspected SARS grabbed me by the scruff of the neck today. The news came hot on the heels of an announcement I noticed by the Saudi Ministry of Health yesterday stating that a new form of the coronavirus has been diagnosed in three people, causing the death of two of them; the third is still undergoing treatment. 

Coronaviruses are considered to be one of the common  agents of the common cold. The first case was a Saudi patient diagnosed in one of the hospitals in Jeddah; the second was a Saudi patient and the third a Gulf State patient. Both were diagnosed in London. The BBC are reporting that the present patient is still undergoing treatment, but an earlier case - a patient suffering the same virus who was transported to London has died. 

The death of these patients may or may not suggest another avian flu outbreak in the offing. While I don't like to scare the horses, one of my pet subjects of interest in the food chain are zoonoses - diseases that pass from animals to humans and have drastic effects in both populations. AIDS, ebola, TB, west nile virus, swine flu, and avian flu are zoonoses - diseases that jump and adapt from animal to human populations. As they are viruses they do not respond to antibiotic treatment. They are also talented at adaptation and mix aspects from one virus with another, allowing them to jump species and affect larger populations of both animals and people; crossing continents within hours and quickly spreading in alarming new ways.

Some scientists blame the prevalence of zoonotic diseases in recent years on the feeding of antibiotics to farm animals, particularly in North America. 70% of antibiotics sold in the US are given to farm animals. In Europe, feeding antibiotics on a daily basis to particularly pigs and poultry is now outlawed, but many countries such as Holland and Denmark still top the European tables on kilograms of antibiotic for kilogram of finished meat. This has lead to the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in both animal and human health, something being examined in Holland in terms of ESBL in chicken populations and how it has lead to untreatable urinary tract infections in the Dutch human population, particularly in older women and young girls. 

When I first came across this research and spoke with the academic in Holland who published it I was shocked to say the least. He told me that in countries like India where there is no upper limit on antibiotics in the animal population the problem is chronic, and many people now have common ailments that are completely resistant to the the first layer of antibiotics such as the penicillen family. They are also becoming resistant to the second layer and only the more rare and newly developed antibiotics are effective against them if at all.  The elephant in the room here is that because of the concentration in recent years on research funding into AIDS and cancer drugs, as antibiotic resistance increases, very few if any new antibiotics are coming on stream.

After digging further on this I found that there is also work being done on antibiotic resistance in animals and it's potential dangers to human health in Ireland at NUI in Galway. Currently they are sampling chicken breasts on sale here to determine how many are carrying ESBL markers. There is certainly awareness of the issue here and it's great to see research taking place on it. We also have much better controls on veterinary medicine in Ireland than in developing countries and less use of animal antibiotics in the food chain than the US and even some of our European neighbours.

While zoonotic diseases are different creatures their origins beg similar questions to be asked. Is intensive indoor housed farming of animals creating a public health nightmare for the future? Would  zoonotics have developed at the same pace without our past predilection for feeding antibiotics to livestock? Is there too little research (as the academics tell me) into how big the problem of disease resistancy is? 

One of the problems with both these health issues is that however well the EU food and veterinary agencies and the IFSA are here at tracking disease, we are dealing with a global food economy. A bird dying from avian flu in a Taiwanese street market can affect a human being in San Francisco within 24 hours. Animal housing, animal welfare and rules governing transport of animals and disease control are often much less stringent in these countries than certainly within the EU. What's heartening to see is that there is recognition of the huge dangers these viruses present, the question is are we coming up with any new ways to deal with them and particularly how to deal with widespread outbreaks? Options

For the moment I'm watching for news on the London case and what it's ramifications are. For Irish farmers avian flu is a nightmare that could shut down the distribution of chicken meat in a matter of hours. But it would need to present in animal populations close to Ireland first. Let's hope it's an isolated case and that before that day arrives, we can learn a more about how to deal with these diseases that both threaten our the health of our farming industry and our human population.  

Organic champions, and going back to our roots

I was delighted to be a judge at this year's Bord Bia National Organic Awards. After all, spending
a day eating and drinking fine food and drink... me? Never...

What was particularly interesting in sampling and examining all the shortlisted entries was the development that the organic sector has experienced in the last ten years; it really has been phenomenal. Yes it's only a small part of the national grocery spend, but as a sector it has developed large successful brands like Glenisk and also promoted Irish artisan food businesses in general.

When I was a producer on Ear to the Ground in the late 1990s I remember an editorial meeting about an organic cheese story we were planning to shoot. We vacillated over the decision as we felt for a farming programme organics were considered niche and outside the box. The situation is totally different today. We know that the marketplace for organic food in Ireland is worth 104 million euros annually. In Germany one in every five euros spent on food is spent on organics. There's no reason why we can't grow our domestic demand and also our share of export product in Germany with the expertise and development farmers and producers here have built over the past decade and more.

Crowes Farm (pictured above and below) won the overall award for their dry-cure rashers. The Crowe family have been farming in Tipperary for over a hundred years and switched over to organic certification in 2007. They now rear and butcher their own pigs (TJ is the butcher in the family) and their short listed rashers were pretty outstanding. We felt this product really deserved the overall award as it just had great eating quality. As it's low in salt and added water it didn't leave the customary mess when cooked. It tasted of good quality pork, not nitrates. Imported bacon which is a problem for Irish pig producers has even

higher levels of added water and nitrate than is allowable in bacon processing in Ireland. So many consumers are eating something which doesn't resemble any type of pig meat but a white mess on the pan, and has shrunk to one third of its pre-cooked size.

That's why Crowe's bacon impressed; it looked and tasted great. The packaging was also simple but contemporary. Many of the products we judged had too much or too little information on the labelling and while I know it's something that's difficult to get right, it's really important for the consumer who pulls that product down from the shelf. I chatted to TJ after the awards ceremony and when I complimented him on the labeling he said it had taken months with the designers to get right. Goes to show hard work pays off.

While there were plenty of unusual foods short listed in the awards we felt as judges that some of the most notable were traditional Irish foodstuffs - Crowe's bacon, Pat Lawlor's porridge oats (pictured right) and Keogh's potatoes; all of whom also won their category. It chimes with where we are economically that the foods we are turning to and interested in again are far from complicated and Irish to the core. If it's a sign we're going back to basics then that can only be a good thing.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted entries and award winners, the quality of everything we judged shows a vibrant organic sector which in uncertain times, is still ploughing ahead offering great food, great food stories and food on the plate that you really want to eat.

Funeral planned this Wednesday for Ireland's "Good Food Sector"

Irish anti-GM groups have today announced a "Funeral Procession" in Dublin this Wednesday 12th for Ireland's good food sector following Teagasc's planting of outdoor GM potatoes. The planned procession will depart from Stephen’s Green (Wolfe Tone Memorial) at 12.00 pm on Wednesday and will arrive at Agriculture House via Dawson Street and Molesworth Street where "a requiem service will take place."
 

The groups involved in the march which include IOFGA and NO2GM, plan to present a spade to Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney to ask him to put a stop to Teagasc's GM trials. I very much doubt this is going to happen after the EPA have approved the trials to go ahead but protesting gives the many individuals and groups in opposition to GM potatoes a chance to air their grievances. Last week they applied in the high court for a  means to tackle tackle Teagasc's plans without GM protestors being personally liable for the costs of the action. They lost the case but I hear there are more challenges to follow so watch out for updates here. 

In this week's edition of the Irish Farmer's Journal I'm away from the topic of food and GM to write about farmers, their vets and what the large animal practice sector may look like in future years. During Ireland's boom, equine and small animal practices thrived and there was a fear that in some rural areas vet cover would decrease to the point of creating difficulties for many farmers. This was borne out in some counties such as Mayo but it's clear now that there is a re-balancing in the sector. 

Large animal practice is thriving and female vets are very much in evidence on farms. As they make up the largest number of veterinary students we will see a slow shift this direction, and happily, all the vets I spoke with in my piece saw a vibrant future in on-farm work. There have been difficulties in the past between vets and farmers (largely relating to cost of services) but I feel it's a relationship becoming less adversarial and more in tune with each other's needs. Animal health on farms and resulting productivity is becoming more and more important, and farmers and vets are clearly working more together in weeding out problems like BVD before they arise. Check out the piece in the Journal and it's available on their smartphone app version which is a brilliant news service. Coming up in later in the series I'll be dealing with food price inflation, problems for Irish pig farmers and Bord Bia's Origin Green - what the scheme means at farm level.   

A party about ...lamb prices

I spent last night at a party with neighbours talking about farming, the price of food and how most farmers in my area now had off-farm employment in order to keep going. One neighbour told me how even when he farmed 1000 ewes he couldn't make a living producing lamb. He now works night shifts in a factory to pay the bills, keeping a few sheep but not planning about getting back into farming full time. He laughed as he looked at the drink in his hand "Basically it wouldn't put diesel in the car".

It's the same story on so many farms across the country."So what's your solution?" I asked. He shrugged his shoulders - "no one wants to pay more for food and that's what lies at the bottom of it". He's right, we do want our food cheap and retailers know that; employing hugely competitive strategies to get our business. Competition between them is relentless and they use two for one offers, discounts and sell some goods like milk below cost to get customers in the door.

Milk is a KVI - a retail term which means "known value item". Many shoppers search for bread or milk at the lowest price possible as households use a lot of these foodstuffs. But consumers will also pick up food other than just KVIs in a store, so the retailers sell product at a loss in order to to make profit on other lines. Unfortunately the person at the end of the chain - the farmer, is who suffers. Recently in the UK, huge pressure on the retail price of milk caused farming protests and eventually, agreement on a code of practice between the dairies and the farming unions. Some retailers also agreed to put up the price for milk, a surprising move in a market that is as sharp as Ireland if not more competitive.

Food prices in Ireland actually have varied little in the past five years, and one of the reasons for this is huge competition among retailers for a marketplace that is in recession. Incomes have fallen and so has our food spend. Research shows we look for KVIs, discounts, offers and are shopping around more. The growth of Aldi and Lidl in both Ireland and the UK are testament to our lust for bargains. While retailers say the customer wants cheap food, we also as customers don't want a food chain where the retailer takes huge percentages of the price we pay for an item, while the person who sowed the crop or raised the livestock gets the smallest slice of the pie.

What's interesting about the farming and food policy of the present Government is their sluggishness or lack of courage in implementing a retail code of practice to encourage fairness in the chain. There's been consultation on this done by the previous Government, it was set to continue and promoted as a badly needed policy in the last election campaign but so far there is no movement on it. Yes we want cheap food but a code of practice spreads the price of that food item more evenly to all the people who contribute to it.

Lamb prices are good now but my neighbour is still not tempted to re-enter the full-time farming fray. We also talked about how Harvest 2020's targets for more sheep on Irish farms could knock back prices as higher supply tends to do. There are no easy solutions but what we all agreed was that the massive power the supermarkets wield has been let go unchecked despite promises to engage with the issue. At the end of the night we took our torches, hi viz vests and walked home on country lanes underneath the stars, stopping at another house for a nightcap, which we needed like the proverbial hole in the head. One thing that keeps rural areas strong is people talking to each other, sharing issues and concerns and also laughing - about kids, animals, livestock... or the financially perilous predicament many now find themselves in. It would be great though to see policy addressing the inequality in the Irish food chain..If we're to see a vibrant rural sector and future generations still farming, we have to step up to the plate and engage with the elephant in the room.  

Would you bet on the price of food if eventually it made you poorer?

Great to read today that Barclays have made £500 million this year from betting on food prices, a practice that has been labelled by observers as "immoral" and "lacking a moral compass". Betting on commodity prices is a major part of the financial trading markets and unfortunately results in making food more expensive for the rest of us.

In the developing world, it can result in even more people starving than at present, and creates uncertainty and pressure on food supplies globally. In Ireland, the hangover from drought in the US, rising grain prices combined with speculative profiteering by commodity traders has had it's own effects. According to the Irish Farmer's Association one third of Irish pig farmers are now close to hitting the wall.

Betting on food prices is a huge driver in the cost of the food, and banks, hedge funds and the like don't give a whit about its knock on effects. In 2008, the exorbitant rise of food prices caused public disorder throughout the developing world and particularly in North Africa. This movement about hunger essentially, and lack of fairness in the food distribution system extended into human rights and became the Arab spring. It felled Colonel Gadaffi in Libya and began the struggle for equality that has lead to the terrible bloodshed now happening in Syria.

I travelled to Lebanon and Syria a few years ago with my husband, not as journalists but as a curious people seeking an inside track on what was going on in these fascinating countries. When I think now of the gorgeous people we stayed with it gives me shivers to think where they might be now. The retired academic who ran a small B and B in Aleppo with a library full of French and English literature and Roman walls propping up the basement. On a rooftop terrace we looked across the dusky skyline of one of the world's most beautiful cities, talked about the Assad regime and how on earth they were going to get rid of him. This fantastic man is surely fled from Syria by now, or else he is dead.

The price of food has always been a driver in political and social change. Land and the resources to grow food on are the primary reason countries go to war. Now more than ever the pressure on fragile world resources in the food chain needs serious attention. We also need to be cogent of a food ownership and distribution system that is deeply inequitable and flawed. Irish farmers are suffering at present as they rely on imported grain and soya to feed livestock and the price of this food has risen to almost twice it's value since the start of this year.

Pigs and poultry who are indoor animals (in the coventional systems) are wholly dependent on cereal food. They are also suffering in the face of cheap imports from the EU and further afield. All of us like a bargain and we're also grocery shopping in more lean times, but asking food producers to grow livestock below the cost of production is something that shouldn't be occurring. On RTE Countrywide on Saturday I joined presenter Damien O'Reilly in examining how critical this problem is. We asked why no mechanism so far seems to able to get the food chain under control and limit its volatility and that knock on effect on farmers and consumers.

Check it out at the link below and ask yourself, is cheap food really the way to go? For all our sakes.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/countrywide/

Meet the GM hacker who modifies food in his kitchen

Is GM food the devil? Last week I spoke at Kilkenny Arts festival on plans to grow genetically modified potatoes for the first time in Ireland. On the panel with me was Cathal Garvey, a bio-hacker who makes GM food in his kitchen, literally. Cathal brought a lot of new light and discussion to the subject.

He gave us a basic run down of how genetic science works and explained how he can hack qualities from one plant (such as luminesence) and insert it into another. Hey presto - glow in the dark bananas. What Cathal advocates is more discussion around GM food which informs consumers rather than scaring them, and liberalising the ability to alter food so that anyone can do it,  taking control from the agri-chem giants such as Monsanto and DuPont.

It's clearly one of the problems in the debate on GM - Monsanto have such a bad name in this area they make the Republican party look like a bunch of Carmelite nuns. And for most people, Monsanto is GM. They have wreaked the American food chain, polluted it's environment with unwanted crops, sued farmers and wield an unethical, ridiculous amount of power in how food is produced.

But genetically modifying food is not simply Monsanto. What Cathal (pictured below) advocates is that GM should be available to everyone. For young scientists like Cathal, there is the potential to create food that is patent free, and could have a role in impacting positively on hunger in the developing world.

Now this kind of talk upsets most people. Most foodies and consumers consider GM devils spawn and any genetic modification of anything, is unnatural, and unwanted. They say GM won't solve world hunger, the GM agri-chems have already meddled with Africa in a threatening way which has benefitted no one but themselves. But again, GM is not Monsanto. It is much more than that. What has raised people's hackles about the proposed trials in Carlow is that the potatoes may eventually become a commercial project that will again benefit private business and no one else. But Teagasc's answer is that it's not a commercial project and that without that without testing GM they can't go forward in understanding how it affects the environment.

If you want an overview of the Teagasc trials, check out this recent piece I did on Today with Pat Kenny explaining the potato sector in Ireland, the prevalence of blight and an explanation of Teagasc's plans at Oakpark.
http://www.rte.ie/radio/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A3228018%3A133%3A14%2D03%2D2012%3A

What's clear is that GM makes people impassioned and angry most of the time. What was refreshing about our talk at Kilkenny is that no one threw rotten fruit at us, all views on the topic were aired and there was lots of new stuff learned by all. Opening up the debate on GM, separating the scientists like Cathal from the Monsantos of this world allow discussion that's not adversarial but interesting, funny and really valuable. And if you want to make your own luminescent yoghurt, have a look at Cathal's website below. And send me some when you're finished.

http://www.indiebiotech.com