Community-supported agriculture

Published in the Kildare Nationalist this week. 

When people start their own business venture, they usually prefer finding investors to relying solely on a bank loan – many other people can share in your risk and rewards, and they find it in their interest to help you succeed. Now, some farmers are using this model, finding selling shares of their farm to the people who will eat the crops.

Under a system called Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA), local residents invest in a farm at thebeginning of the year, before the crops have been planted. Typically each family buys a standard share of the farm’s produce, and in exchange they receive a box of crops each week for the rest of the season. What they receive will depend on the time of year, but if a farmer plants enough variety, any weeks’ box will likely have several different kinds of crops, whether delivered in May or October.

Such projects make a farm particularly resilient in the face of global financial crises. A CSA farm does not depend on loans from major banks to continue from year to year, nor do its crop sales depend onthe vagaries of faraway markets. A CSA pays the farmer early in the year, so that the farm does not have to go deeply in debt each year, and it allows the farmer to market their food before their 16-hour days begin.

Sometimes a CSA plan finds a use for plots near towns that otherwise might go unused. They providework for farmers in an age when their numbers are diminishing – and if the community hires young people as hands, they give wages and rural skills to local youths.

In addition, CSAs allow neighbours to form a personal relationship with the person who is growing their food, and allows the farmer to hear and respond to consumer demand quickly, without the need for commissioning survey groups. Since people must invest in the farm, they usually must cometo the farm at least once a year, and get to meet the farmer and see where their food comes from. They must accept a variety of vegetables and learn to cook them.

But perhaps the most important use of such farms is giving a community food that is not flown in from across an ocean -- food that must often be must be sealed in plastic and foam packaging, sometimes preserved in chemical gases, to delay spoilage. We are surrounded by fertile land here in Ireland, yet we import 90 per cent ofour food. If there were an oil crisis, as many predict is beginning now, we would have to rebuild muchof our local agriculture from scratch.

If the farm is next door, the food is always fresh, no rubbish need be generated, and we would not use those thousands of gallons of fossil fuel right away, and do our part to delay a global energy crunch. CSAs can go beyond vegetables as well, to include grains, meat, home-made bread, eggs, cheese, flowers or fruit. Several farmers could join forces to create a regional CSA, coordinating their efforts –one supplying chickens, for example, and another supplying vegetables.

By looking at ways to embrace CSAs in this country, we might be able to stem the gradual loss of our farms and farming families, and to ensure that those that remain not just survive, but thrive.

Back from book-binding

I’m just now back from spending the weekend in the Ox Mountains of County Sligo, a land of lonely beauty like you don’t expect to see outside of a Lord of the Rings film. I was taking a course in bookbinding from one of the few remaining craftsmen of that art. More on that later.

For now, here are a couple of small books I made under his guidance – one covered in calf vellum, the other in deer. They are just first attempts, of course, and filled with mistakes, but they were immensely satisfying to make by hand.

End of winter

The last day of winter for us is St. Bridget’s Eve, and this was a beautiful fresh sunny day, with a gentle wind two points south of west. This last day of winter put on a pleasant appearance as if it were saying, “I was soft and easy with you for the last three months, and now, as we are going to part, let us shake hands with each other in a friendly manner. Good bye!”

On St. Bridget’s Eve the little girls go from door to door with brideogs, images of St. Bridget dressed up in lovely clothes, asking for halfpennies – and getting them – to have a party for themselves, just as the young boys do with the wren in the holly branch on St. Stephen’s Day.

- From the diary of Tomas de Bhaldraithe, 31st January 1827, in The Diary of an Irish Countryman.

The old roots

We like to walk through woods near our house, formerly the grounds of a castle, built in the 1600s and almost destroyed in the 1641 rebellion, rebuilt and extended over the centuries.The home of the baronial family that ruled these lands now lies vacant, its halls of power now open to the sky.

From the nearby lake we can hear the trills of moorhens and the squeaks of coots, tending their chicks in the dense thickets of reeds. On one corner of the lake must once have sat a small boathouse, now covered with rocks like a cairn.

On the top of this mound, its roots winding through and over the rubble, grows a single tree, somehow thriving on the barest of surfaces and clinging to the mound through the fiercest of winds.

Life on the canal

We live along a canal dug more than 250 years ago, to ship turf in barges to the hearths of Dublin. Now, these same canals serve as a home for people -- sometimes families -- who roam up and down the canal, changing the scenery outside their window whenever they like.

My favourite houseboat so far was one that had gardens on its deck, giving the owners a permanent source of vitamins. I'm told that other houseboat owners have cultivated patches of wild edibles along the canal banks in patches, harvesting as they go.

Away from it all

I was standing on the bank above my house, and Sean Seamais went by in his boat.

"Why are you hoisting sail for now, in God's name?" I asked.

"That's more than I can tell you," he called back, "Except I have the seven cares of the mountain on my shoulders, with no end of things to do, and I'm making a start on none of them."

"It is often before now that a man pitched away his last and his awls when he had too much to face," said I.

"I'm in the same case," Sean answered. "There are people gathering seaweed.* I need turf. I have sheep to dip. I need flour. I have a wall to repair. I have a shed to rebuild. I have a trawl-line to see to and a net to prepare. I left the house now to have a day away from it all, for I couldn't decide which should be tackled first."

-- from the journals of Tomas O'Crohan of Blasket Island, February 1920, as reprinted in Island Cross-Talk.

* Seaweed was spread over fields as fertiliser.

Haymaking

"Haymaking started when the meadows were ripe, and the men used scythes. They would help each other, in a co-operative effort called a meitheal (mee-hall) and were given porter and potatoes, bacon and cabbage and bread or boxty for tea.

The oats were ripe around this time and ready for cutting. Oats were important – like potatoes, the main food of the people. When the corn (oats) was ripe the men cut it with hooks and tied it into sheaves, long enough to handle.

It was then stoked, six to eight sheaves standing on end, supporting each other. The stooks were left in the field for a time before they were brought into the haggard and stores in stacks and covered.

 Threshing was an unbelievable feat of endurance. The barn was cleared and the flagged floor scrubbed clean. Neighbours who knew the art of wielding a flail commenced. The flail was made of two strong sticks tied together at one end with leather. The sheaves were put into the centre of the floor in bundles of five or six. Each man wielded the flail in turn until the oats were separated from the straw.

The oats went into sacks and the straw for thatching. It was the work of a few nights. Next came the winnowing – getting rid of the chaff. It would have to be a special sort of day for this work with the wind blowing."

-- Memories of Kathleen Sheehan, growing up in County Cavan circa 1920. Recorded in the book No Shoes in Summer.

Christmas memories

Mary O’Sullivan: Christmas was a very big event then – now it’s a big event commercially, but then it was a big event from a different perspective. It was the time of year when – we talk about spring cleaning now, but then it was the Christmas cleaning. In the run-up to Christmas the dishes were taken down off the dressers, all the cobwebs were knocked down and windows were cleaned and the whole place was whitewashed.

My father was born on a farm about a mile from the village, and had a significantly different upbringing to my mother in the village, and my father used to say that Christmas on a farm was a very big event – this was before electrification, in the era of the tilly lamp. People didn’t just hop into the car and go to town – most people wouldn’t have had a car, just a horse and trap if they were lucky or a donkey and trap. So they would have only gone to town a few times a year, and going before Christmas was a major event.

On Christmas Eve there was the lighting of the candle – a big red wax candle, put into a jam jar filled with sand, ringed with holly and lit by the youngest member of the household. Then the neighbours rambled in.

The concept of rambling went out with the advent of television, but it was how people entertained themselves in the 20s, 30s, 40s. They walked to one another’s houses at night time and talked about what had happened during the week, weddings, funerals, wakes and local affairs, and someone would get out an accordion and tell stories and sing songs.

Ray O’Sullivan: Christmas Eve was a fast day, and all we could eat was salted ling fish, and it tasted terrible. People dreaded the thought of it from about October, but it was nearly like a penance. It used to hang in the fishmongers and you got the smell off it.

Christmas Eve was like good Friday is now, (with all shops closed - BK), and that was just in the mid-1970s and 80s, and it’s funny how quickly things have changed in such a short time.

The O'Sullivans were interviewed by RTE radio about the Christmases of their childhoods, December. 2009.  Photo: The canal outside our house a few winters ago.

Christmas on an island

"It is wild and gusty today. People are gathering green branches and to decorate the windows – ivy and other evergreens. The houses have been without a daub of whitewash since last summer. There was not a crumb of lime to be had in Dingle since the trains stopped running. Many another item is not to be found, and no means of procuring it.

I am writing this on the Saturday before Christmas; Christmas Eve is tomorrow. The people who have gone out to the mainland have not yet returned yet on account of the bad weather. ‘Maybe,’ the children say, ‘the bad weather will ruin the Holy Night.’

The people of this village have made a trip to the hill and a sheep for nigh every household has been slaughtered. I suppose those who have such delicacies will share them with the neighbours; the established custom here is for everyone to share, except that we are seeing many changes in the world now, where there had been none for a long time."

-- From the diaryof Thomas O'Crohan, on Blasket Island, 1922.

The sound of an engine in the distance

"Most people had a pony or donkey, but young people walked. The only motor car in the area was owned by the solicitor, and he drove it to see people who were making out their will, and once people heard the motor-car, they started talking about the person as though he were dead already. 

There were two motorbikes in our area, one owned by the priest, and the other owned by the doctor -- and when they passed late at night, we knew by the sound of the bike which one it was passing. As soon as they heard it in the distance, people were in a panic as to who was badly off."

-- Recollections of Aine Aherne, of Nohoba Kinsale, County Cork. The car belongs to my neighbour.

P.S. Blogging has been a bit light lately. Sorry. Christmas and all.