Bord Bia is launching a four-week campaign to showcase the work farmers and growers are taking to help environment.

The campaign, starting Monday 16 November, will be targeted at urban consumers and will include advertising across social media, print, video, and online.

Adults in towns and cities with an interest in green living, the outdoors, animal welfare, and food will be the primary targets.

Four farmers will feature in the campaign - dairy farmer Bruce Thompson, organic beef farmer Jane Shackleton, sheep farmer Brian Nicholson, and farm manager at Finnegan’s Farm John Smith.

The campaign aims to provide accessible information on the farming practices adopted by each farmer that contributes to the environment and animal health.

Additional efforts

“Individual farmers who are making additional efforts to protect the environment are often overlooked in the debate about agriculture emissions,” Deirdre Ryan, director of Origin Green and Quality Assurance at Bord Bia noted.

“Through this campaign, Bord Bia wants to highlight positive stories to the public – targeted at the non-farming public – who may be unaware of the practices and initiatives Irish farmers undertake to benefit the environment.”

The farmers

Bruce Thompson

Bruce Thompson from Ballyfinn in Co. Laois for the Irish Dairy Farmer magazine 2019

Bruce runs a 230 herd dairy farm, along with his father, near Portlaoise. Bruce has been able to reduce the need to dose his herd by repopulating his soil with dung beetles, who help to reduce harmful parasites.

Dung beetles offer a host of other environmental benefits: they aerate the soil helping to reduce run-off, they help to decompose dung pats; and they have increased biodiversity on Bruce’s farm by providing a food source for birds and other wildlife.

Bruce has been encouraging other farmers to monitor their land for dung beetles through his ‘Operation Defecation’ programme.

“Our objective is to make this as simple as possible for farmers to learn more ways of being sustainable on farm and to come up with a blueprint parasite plan for the year. This will involve good stockmanship and a small degree of risk but the plan will essentially be very rewarding,” Bruce explained.

Jane Shackleton

Jane Shackleton

Jane is an organic beef farmer from Mullagh near the Cavan/Meath border. Jane runs a 100% grass-fed, suckler to beef herd of Angus and Belted Galloways. Along with her parents, Jonathan and Daphne, Jane is a current Farming for Nature Ambassador.

Jane is currently studying a PhD with University College Dublin and Devenish where her focus is multispecies swards. In addition to pastures, Jane grazes her cattle in agro-forestry, planted 22 years ago with ash, oak, birch, larch, beech, Norway spruce and Scots pine.

Cattle are finished at 18 to 24 months off grass typically with just one housing period. The shelter provided by the trees allows Jane to extend the grazing season and offers protection from drought in the summer.

“We know what our priorities are and we protect areas for biodiversity, we leave areas for wildlife, while at the same time producing 100% grass-fed beef,” according to Jane.

Brian Nicholson

Brian Nicholson checking his ewes and fresh born lamb on grass on his farm at Johnstown, Co. Kilkenny.

Sheep farmer Brian runs a 100 hectare farm of approximately 1,000 ewes near Johnstown, Kilkenny.

As a member of GLAS, each year Brian plants 2.5 acres of wild bird cover – a spring-sown crop mixture that is left unharvested over winter. In addition to this, he has also added in a wild flower mixture for pollinators to encourage bees around the farm, and has invested in maintaining hedgerows to provide shelter for lambs and habitat for wildlife.

Brian regularly measures his grass and conducts soil sampling, adding red and white clover, plantain, and fescue to his grassland, to improve soil health, reduce the need for fertilisers and provide high-quality forage for his sheep.

“I always try to do what I can for nature, whether that’s making or extending nature corridors or planting extra pollinator seeds to increase the variety of plant and animal life from within. This essentially helps to create a lot more influx of wildlife which feeds into the greater ecosystem on the farm,” Brian said.

John Smith

John Smith, from Thurstianstown, manages Finnegan’s Farms, which is owned by Finnegan brothers Paul and Joe in Balrath. Finnegans supply potatoes and Brussels sprouts direct to retail and run an on-farm kitchen producing side dishes using vegetables that don’t make the grade for retail.

As part of their Origin Green sustainability plan, they have installed an on-site digester that processes food waste from their kitchen into organic compost.

John said: “We are what we call a closed circle farm. We grow our own produce, package it ourselves, and we put any waste from our kitchen into a digester which breaks down the sprouts or potatoes into organic compost”.

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