This was my woods. You could see the house. Glimpses. Between the trees. We had forest schools. Kids and woodsmoke trickling mischievously between the trunks. Pine martens. Deer. Ravens. Red Squirrel too. Working their way to their welcome hazel thieving in the copse... ...we planted on the hill.

The morning after Eowyn I saw. The air sucked from me. Giant rootplates forking perpendicular to the sky. Great ten tonne scoops of root and clay. Divots fifteen foot deep and thirty across. Sycamore and ash threaded through the ramrod...

On day five we fled. Picked up everything and ran. The storm had been, and gone. Things settled. Quiet. The nights perfect dark. No light for miles. No light. No heat. No water. No power. For five days then. 7 now. On day 4. We could see our breath in the bedrooms. The kitchen... ...Eating breakfast. And, the next morning has the kind of cold you find outdoors. That bites down between the layers and cosmos it's used into your bone.The crews cutting the trees are working hammer and tongs. They are tired. Drained. Angry. But. Hard at the work...

For all the talk of derogations, food security, sovereignty and supply. For all the arguments against radically changing farming. For staying, spraying, slurrying, fertilising. There's this.
Farming is the canary in the climate coalmine. It's farming climate is coming for... ...first.

We are getting the first taste. Grain crops flooded in fields. Or mashed to unharvestability by months of rain. Crops unsowable or ungrowable, because of rain, drought. Soil washed out in filthy brown streams from months, and months, and moths of rain...

Our four acre field is split into three habitats. Wetland woodland, traditional wildflower hay meadow, unimproved pasture. Here's what I've learned from working on, maintaining and creating all three. A thread ..



1. Shifting the pasture from 70% rushes to 30% rushes ( approx ) has boosted the wildflower diversity, and hugely boosted the density of wildflowers. We have spreads of ragged robin, bugle, speedwell, marigold, bluebells, herb Robert and others where we had isolated spots...

"Eating is an agricultural act"-Wendell Berry.

I got into an argument. About farming. We are greedily destroying everything in our relentless, grasping, money hungry search for profit they said.

The person was angry. Worried. Ethical. Scared. But I think wrong... How farming happens is shaped by economics. The difference between economics and greed? Greed is a choice. Economics is the context which determines choice.

What people choose to put on the end of their forks has the largest single impact on how the food gets there...

"By the time and ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser" - Richard Powers, The Overstory.

I planted Sweet Chestnut here. In part because people told me not to. It's too wet. Too cold. Too clay. Too North. Too Roscommon for Sweet Chestnut... ...But. Being stubborn. And willfull. And with an optimism that gets me into as much trouble as it does push me to create surprised delight. I planted them. Yearling saplings. I cleared a circle of bramble patch for each one ...

How did I become this man?

This firewood splitter. Hedgerow stitcher. This axe and spade and froe man. This pots of bubbling jam man. This out under the sun and moon man. This lamb chasing ewe carrying ram wrangling shearman. This scythe man. This butcher a hung hogget... ...on the kitchen table man. A spade ringing like a bell man. A Hawk chasing butterfly mad man. A man for owls and wildflowers. A dragonfly and raven man. A breaking ice on buckets and carrying hay in the storm man. A farming man. A garden man. A tree mad wetland...

Traditionally, on Irish farms, poultry, eggs, dairy were seen as women's work. Men would not do the it. Would not handle the money from the work. Known as pinny money, women would fold the money into their pinny, and it would be theirs. The upside. The dairy and the egg laying... ...were usually the moneymakers on the farm. Regular. In demand. Predictable. And better paid than sheep or cattle. Pinny money was a source of economic independence for women. Until...

Long, kinds meandering thread.

"You were in one another's fields back then and one another's lives"

My neighbour talking about hay making as a child.

Modern farming has made villages quieter. Hedgerows, river, skies too. Corncrakes, curlews, post offices, pubs gone... ...the efficiency of cheap food. Something that has scraped fields clean of living things and scraped farms clean of the communities that once worked them. No longer space for wild things and people.

And so. It takes just one person to spray a field with roundup. And so...

I spent time on a @farmfornature walk on EamonnMcDonaghs mixed farm in Mayo. He ploughs 2 acres with ox, sells the veg direct, almost 0 inputs, profits almost 100% from his output. Is ruthlessly, organically profit focused. Here's a thread on what I learned... ...

1. Be a price maker. Not a price taker. Eamon sells direct. To customers and shops he knows. At a price that makes sense to all three.

2. A conventional farm makes revenue by spending money on fertility. A successful mixed farm makes revenue by saving money on fertility...

I'm coming, slowly, to the idea that the destruction of our biodiversity, is also the destruction of the part of our collective sanity that requires wilderness to thrive. That we require to thrive. We are anxious. Nervous. Worried. Scared. Because we fear for the future, but also ...because we have been designed by evolution, for tens of millennia, to make sense of, and in, the natural world. Out senses are keyed, tuned, honed and alive to the scents, sounds, tastes and touch of mountains, woods, wet soil, petrichir hot in the air, the dense scent...

Farming was a guardian. A custodian. A guarantor. A certainty. A comfort.

The work of farming was food and filth, muck, life and death. But it was more.

Farms were not just custodians of a landscape. They were custodians of that part of our identity we stowed in the landscape ...People have always looked to farms and farmers to keep safe the sense of ourselves we have banked in the land, the landscape. Brillat Savarin said, "Show me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are". That sense of cultural self is not just in the food we eat...

My farm is untidy. Inefficient. Self seeded trees colonise viable field. Blocked drains create wetland. The margins, yard, old veg plots overgrown with hip tall weeds. An orchards is filled with rotting trees. Parts of it can't be access with a tractor... ....in high summer it's mess. You can't see the pasture from the driveway. Angelica and hogweed grown taller than I am. Bushes and trees crowd onto the road. The new or hard overgrown. Thick with weeds and bramble. The top field by the spring choked with uncut rushes...

An old farmer stopped on the road. Reversed his tractor to talk to me. 70 he is. "You wouldn't know this" he said. "But this is the first yearcI have heard the cuckoo before I saw the swallows since the 1970's" Ot might seem like a small thing. But its not. It's everything... ...he told me why. A hurricane had ripped through their migration path in the North of France decimating their numbers. And he wanted me to know. It was all he said. He started his tractor, shifted into gear, and trundled off to tend cattle...

Heres why I think small farms hold one of the keys to our environmental causes. And why their loss, and replacement with large scale farming is a potentially dangerous tragedy... ...small farmers live where they work and love where they work. Their homes, families, their connection to communities mean they are tied to their land. It means something. It can mean almost everything...