On Cloughjordan Community Farm it takes a village to grow 50 sorts of vegetables. Located at the heart of Cloughjordan ecovillage, an intentional community on 67 acres in the Irish midlands, the member-owned farm produces high quality, nutritionally dense veggies using agroecological methods. Community is central to the farm’s work, from its CSA scheme to volunteering, and most recently a big effort to plant 2,000 trees for syntropic farming. Letter from the farm by Oliver Moore.
In Ireland the concept of Community Supported Agriculture has not taken off in any great numbers. Ours is the biggest CSA initiative in the country, supplying about 90 local families with vegetables.
Anyone in the locality can join. Half of the members are from the region and half from the ecovillage. Most pay monthly and are long term subscribers. For this, they share in the risk, reward and responsibility of production. This means that our farmers are paid a living wage, and members get guaranteed access to the vegetables.
Members do not know exactly what they will get – there is no set box of veg. Instead, there is a pickup point where the vegetables are delivered twice a week. The idea is to take what you think you should, or what you need, while leaving enough for others. With 50+ crops grown annually, and some winter storage on site, there is usually plenty.
Any surplus veg is sold at a digital farmers market: the farm facilitates the North Tipperary branch of the Open Food Network. Orders are placed online, and the producer simply shows up with the ordered amount at market time – this means no waste, or standing around waiting to sell. This market is now also extending into the nearest large town, Nenagh, in the coming months.
Helping out
Members join in on some farm activities, mostly planting and harvesting the field scale crops – onions and potatoes especially.
Indeed, over a dozen local volunteers help out with all aspects of running this community owned farm. Along with growers Francie Wollen and Alice Taylor, and farm supervisor Pat Malone, the team includes interns from around Europe who come as European Solidarity Corp volunteers.
In Irish, the word meitheal is used when people come together to help each other out when there are big group jobs to be done. Traditionally this meant activities like saving hay. Meitheals survived up until the 1950s, but eventually, the extractive colonial structures imposed on agri-food in Ireland were too much for this communal approach to farming to survive beyond small pockets of resistance.
Meitheals have made a comeback in recent years. Our tree planting on the farm in March was a great way to revive the meitheal – 2000 trees don’t plant themselves!
Planting trees for syntropic systems
Our new grower Alice explains how we planted trees for syntropic farming: “We planted out rowan, hazel and birch into our alleys, between beds, at intervals of 6 metres. These trees will be the backbone of our syntropic alleyways. The trees we leave un-coppiced for the biodiversity, deep roots, nutrients and water retention provided, and also the beauty and shade.
“Along the rest of the alley is densely planted hawthorn (white thorn), and willow, which will be coppiced regularly. This coppicing will send signals to the other trees (and crops), to grow strong instead, whilst the coppiced and dropped young branches will bring in essential nutrients to the soil, as organic matter, to balance out the carbon:nitrogen ratio, to increase fungal and bacterial activity, and maybe act as micro havens for beneficial bugs too.”
Once set up, syntropic systems are a minimal interference form of agriculture, favouring no dig and even minimal mulching and compost.
Cloughjordan Community Farm loosely follows biodynamic guidelines. Alice notes that that March morning “was a fruit day on a descending moon”, making it “a perfect day for planting trees and encourage their fruit.”
Experimenting with new practices
At present, the syntropic trial is on just two of the farm’s seven fields.
Trialling and then integrating agroecological and regenerative elements and approaches helps prevent the soil from becoming exhausted. Growing on the same 6-8 acres (3 hectares) for 15 years can be extractive.
To deal with this we have trialled and implemented various regenerative practices over the years. There is a strong focus on high quality compost and mushroom/bacterial inoculations; composted farmyard manure (brought in); and up to 1/3 of the land has been in a green manure at any one time.
Specific beneficial plants have been grown but not harvested on the land, to nourish the soil. Sometimes this is a colourful collection of plants including vetch and mustard, sometimes just a simple grass.
There is also a member’s area on the farm called Cuan Beo. This is a welcoming place where members can try out their own growing, often experimenting with new crops or styles. It’s a colourful part of the farm, where there are also activities such as community seed saving sessions and other workshops, many of which are open to the wider public.
Sharing the farm’s bounty
Community meals are an important way for people to come together and share in the farm’s bounty in a convivial way. People in the ecovillage and friends bring and share dishes to a house where someone has decided to host the gathering.
These gatherings are also a casual way to learn how to get creative with unusual vegetables.
Eats and Beats is an event the farm hosts in a large room that we rent in the community enterprise centre on site in the ecovillage. Here, local cooks work from the farm’s surplus to create a meal for whoever books the event. After eating comes the dancing.
Farm surplus and interesting recipes are again centre stage at a Tuesday cafe. Each week, whatever the stresses and strains of life, I make a seasonal green leaf pesto. This is served up along with soups feeding members, workers, volunteers and whomsoever arrives.
All of these spaces and places – Cuan Beo, community meals, soup cafe, and eats and beats – are open to the wider community, not just farm members. They each provide pathways into the farm and its ways, while giving people the option of spending time together.
Seed saving
An important part of the farm’s ethos is seed saving. This reduces costs while also increasing resilience. Crops like onions have been saved over the years to the point that the Cloughjordan Onion has been developed. It grows and stores especially well on the farm’s land, having been selected for robustness and flavour over many years.
A new seed drying unit was built last summer, to further develop the practice.
The open pollination that accompanies seed saving is also good for biodiversity. With an increasingly uncertain global future, with trade in resources and inputs more fraught than ever, as well the global seed market being dominated by a few mega corporations, seed saving is a savvy way for us to be more self-reliant.
Realistic alternatives
A system such as this – gloriously complex and bountiful as it is, isn’t all smooth sailing. All kinds of complications can arise when dealing with people, farming and nature.
Sometimes weather extremes impact certain crops or plans, which in turn impacts yield. And it’s hard to compete with supermarkets when vegetables are used as loss leaders there.
Decision-making is more democratic but it can also be slow, which can be frustrating.
But for all the challenges, the model has shown itself to be robust. Community owned farms may not be able to answer every question posed by a dysfunctional agri-food system, but they can offer insights and realistic alternatives to many of them.
One thing is for sure – there’s a lot of vegetables to manage, but there’s a lot more than vegetables to our farm.
Oliver Moore, a resident of Cloughjordan ecovillage, helps Cloughjordan Community Farm with events, projects and communication. He has been involved in various capacities since 2010, and served twice as a board member.
More from Cloughjordan
Feeding Ourselves 2024 – A Food Revolution Starts With Seed!
Feeding Ourselves 2023 – Diversified Diversification in Action
Feeding Ourselves 2023 – Building Bridges for Rural Resilience
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