West Cork hosted an international conference on agroforestry in Bantry in mid-November. The Irish Agroforestry Forum hosted the event titled ‘Farmer-led Climate Adaptation and Mitigation. Why and how trees on farms can help’ and attendees heard that farmers have committed to planting over 400,000 trees under the ACRES tree planting […]
The clocks may have gone back an hour but in a lot of West Cork farmyards it feels like they’ve jumped forward by a month. Not just locally, but across the country, livestock have been housed earlier than usual because of the weather – the ground is saturated. For most […]
If you’re travelling along the Wild Atlantic Way, in the vicinity of the Galley Head lighthouse and Long Strand at Castlefreke, you may have noticed the appearance of a small herd of pigs in recent years. Shane Kenneally and his family started breeding pigs on the small holding they have […]
It’s been a disheartening backend! I thought we might get a run of settled dry weather in September given how wet things were in July and August but it wasn’t to be with Storm Agnes adding yet more wind and rain to deal with. Dock leaves in the field closest […]
As part of the celebrations to commemorate the centenary of Drinagh co-op, Phillip O’Regan has written a book ‘100 Years of Drinagh Co-operative Creamery Limited’. Expected to be published at the end of October 2023, Tommy Moyles says it is the remarkable story of how a small community, in what […]
I think it’s fair to say this summer has been a far cry from the sunshine and record commodity prices of summer 2022. Rain has made for an incredibly difficult harvest for tillage farmers. The washout summer, a contraction in milk price in excess of 30 per cent and continuing uncertainty […]