Consumers urged to buy Irish vegetables this Christmas

One Irish organic vegetable grower is urging consumers to check food labels and if they can at all, to support their local Irish farmer – organic or conventional – this Christmas.

Kenneth Keavey runs Green Earth Organics in Corrandulla, Co Galway, where he grows, buys and distributes organic vegetables across the country.

With a background in science and having spent his summers working on farms, he returned home to the 25ac family farm in 2004 from the UK, with his wife Jenny, where they set about getting organic certification with the Irish Organic Association.

“It was my grandad’s farm. It’s a small farm, about 25ac. He would have been a mixed farmer. He was actually the head gardener in Cregg Castle in Corrandulla.

“My dad was born in the gatehouse of Cregg. They came down here and got the land from the Land Commission after independence,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

“In 2006 we started growing for our first vegetable box deliveries on a quarter of an acre to about 20 customers. I was also working in Medtronic at the time to have an income. From there it grew, literally.”

Keavey now supplies around 5,000 weekly customers with vegetable boxes nationwide, has launched a special Christmas vegetable box this week and buys other Irish organic vegetables from growers around the country.

“When it comes to deciding if we’re going to buy imported carrots or Irish carrots, we have an agreement with an Irish grower and we will, irrespective of anything else, commit to their carrots 100% until the season is over.

“If there is Irish produce there, provided the quality is in it, we will always buy that.

“We base that whole relationship on fair pricing and fair agreements. The knock-on effect is the price we have to sell the product for is more expensive. It makes a fairer food chain,” he said.

Supermarkets

The Galway farmer believes that the supermarket model has conditioned consumers over the last 20 years “to have the expectation that fresh food hasn’t really any value and is dirt cheap”. However, he believes there has been a shift in mindset.

“There’s an appetite from some consumers that they’re looking at Irish produce in particular and they’re going, OK, this is important and maybe it is OK to spend a little bit extra on that.”

He said that supermarkets have been proactively, whether intentionally or not, undermining the horticulture industry in Ireland.

“That’s an absolute fact of the business they’re in. I don’t think it’s intentional, but they’ve demanded lower and lower prices and forced farmers to accept those prices.

“The bottom line is, if you’re going to drive a farmer out of business over 5c for a head of celery because you want to be as competitive as the discounters or whatever, then that’s not going to lead anywhere positive and certainly not anywhere positive from the point of view of local Irish production and food security with a backdrop of climate change.”

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for the business. At one stage he was supplying about 50 supermarkets directly in Galway, Mayo and Donegal. However, that ended after a new fresh food manager was appointed in a particular supermarket.

“We had a very good customer, I won’t mention any names. We would have had up to €1,000 a week in sales with this one store. They got a new fresh food manager.

“On the Monday when we were calling in to get the order, he told us our prices had to come down, the margins had to be cut, we had to be responsible for the waste on the shelves and we had to merchandise the shelves ourselves.

“I took a bit of a fit and said that was that. In that week, we stopped supplying all the supermarket stores. It was a bit of a rash decision and it probably wasn’t the best, most measured approach to it. But it allowed us to focus on farmers’ markets, home delivery and we were also supplying restaurants,” he said.

The recession also hit the business. “People were buying organic back in those days, it was the height of the boom. They were buying organic because it was fashionable, people wanted to say they were buying organic. We had built up our home delivery service. The crash came, we lost nearly all of our customers and that’s when we got into supplying supermarkets directly,” he said.

“We grow 20ac of mixed organic vegetables, have seven polytunnels and for a farm our size we’ve a very nice array of equipment and tech to help us deal with weed control and that sort of stuff,” Keavey said.

But he added that 2024 has been a desperate growing season.

“In June 2023, it started raining in the west of Ireland and it didn’t stop until fairly recently. It has been the two wettest growing seasons nearly on record. That has meant we haven’t been able to plant crops early enough.

“Our tomatoes were six weeks late. We didn’t recover that, our tomato plants came at a loss because you can’t lose six weeks of growing on tomatoes. They’re high value, the season is short, you need to get your harvest done in the timeframe you have.

“A lot of other crops were slow to come, we couldn’t get into them on time because land was too wet, then weed pressure became an issue and that reduced yield and competitiveness,” he said.

Green Earth Organics recently won the direct-to-consumer award at the National Organic Awards. When asked why he decided to go organic 20 years ago, Keavey said that his view on the world is fairly straightforward.

“The planet is here and we have to take care of it and in order to do that we have to grow something sustainably. As Irish people we’re very attached to our land and that’s very important to us.

“Growing food, being respectful to biodiversity and growing food that gives you the biggest return for the area you have are two of the key criteria we factored in,” he said.

Despite the weather, labour and supermarket challenges, he believes there’s an opportunity to grow the industry.

“We need someone that’s driving the supports from a political perspective and negotiations with key buyers. I think it’s important to have someone there to represent the sector, that can only be good in the long-term and from a food security perspective,” he added.