Paul O'Doherty profiles businesses that represent the face of modern farming. Marc Michel is not your typical Wicklow farmer. With his tight haircut, sandy-brown fatigues, Yasser Arafat-style scarf, and self-aware strut, he could easily pass for a French Foreign Legionnaire who fell to earth with the wrong co-ordinates.
Although a self-confessed loner, he can be charming and welcoming, and is not afraid to mix it on any number of topics including hydrogenated vegetable oil, the modern food industry, sugar additives, dodgy carrots, green manure, litter, Fair Trade, numerous film analogies, the supermarket industry, and his relationship with Superquinn in particular.
Michel is also a part-time builder, conservationist, cordon bleu chef, one-time au pair, and former student of AnCO (the precursor of FÁS) in Ballyfermot. And, not one to miss an opportunity, he's now talking up the new organic café at his Organic Life shop, on his 63-acre farm in Kilpedder, Co Wicklow, just off the N11.
Regular visitors to his shop in Kilpedder, and shoppers at Morton's in Ranelagh, Donnybrook Fair in Donnybrook, Supervalu in Mount Merrion or Caviston's in Glasthule, among others, will be aware of Marc Michel and his organic vegetables.
So, why open a café 200 feet up a mountain in the Garden of Ireland? "I feel I have something to offer that's different - not only that all the food we produce will be certified organic, but that it will be served enthusiastically." The café is housed alongside his organic shop in a large, unremarkable concrete-floored greenhouse, in the middle of the farm. However, once inside, there is a 150-year-old Italian olive tree - with lots of smaller "Wicklow olive trees" at the sides, a little soft music, seating for 40-odd people, parasols and decking. It presents an alternative to the Avoca Handweavers restaurant nearby in Kilmacanogue.
So what sort of food can one expect in the organic café? "A lot will depend on availability. For instance, our chicken supplier had a visit from a fox the other day, and some of the chickens went into shock and aren't laying as many eggs as they should." So, presuming the chickens make a full recovery, what else is on the menu?
Head chef Paul Quinn, formerly of the Hungry Monk in Greystones, says the main dishes will include "classic Caesar salad, with the Cos straight off the farm; fillet of steak (from Farrelly's butchers in Delgany village), marinated for about a week in Tamari and cider vinegar and chilli and garlic, served with courgette and fresh beetroot salad; organic linguini and prawns with fresh coriander and chilli; tuna with tomato and sweet chilli jam and a broadbean salad; and organic burgers with onion marmalade and guacamole."
With a French-sounding name and the total absence of a Wicklow twang, it is difficult to place Michel, the organic farmer. He takes up the story: "My parents moved here in 1962 from Germany. My father imported and distributed perfumes and cosmetics from Germany - initially - and then France. For a number of years, my mother had her own brand of cosmetics - Iris Michel - made in a basement in 85 Lesson Street."
"My parents starved during and after the war, and my father promised my mother she'd never have to do that again. He knew that in Germany, the most well-off people were always the farmers - food was the currency at the time. We moved here in 1976 to Kilpedder and bought Tinna Park farm, which was then let to a tillage farmer, not organic. At that stage [when he was 10] I started growing vegetables in a walled garden. I did as little school work as I possibly could. There were far too many carrots to be weeded. I would have a 'flu in the morning that would miraculously disappear by about 10 o'clock. So I've been growing vegetables all my life - I'm 37 now.
"In 1982, the last non-organic stuff was grown here, and we got our certified organic symbol two years later. At the time, there was no organic symbol inspectorate scheme in Ireland. We were the first in Ireland to be inspected and certified as organic by the Soil Association in England. Now we are inspected by the Organic Trust of Ireland."
While still in his teens, Michel combined his love of farming with courses in carpentry, joinery and plastering at AnCO in Ballyfermot, au-paired in France during the summer, and completed a cordon bleu cookery course in Alix Gardner's school. "In 1983, I was cooking in that kind of old-world never-heard-of-stainless steel type of kitchen in a cellar. All the cooking was done on a solid fuel range, in the middle of Paris. All the vegetables were kept in the cellar, there was no cold-room. It was humid, with these stockpots boiling away all the time. And the most incredible sauces came out of them.
"The kitchen would be shut down and you'd be put in jail if it was run in Ireland now, but the food was just magnificent. The same people came there every day from the Stock Exchange. You knew who was coming, and at what time. It was definitely slow food, but it could always be prepared to order. It's very much what I'd like to achieve here - to have slow food fast, with a strong emphasis on preparation and stocks, and obviously the food coming from 10 feet away.
"When my wife discovered she was allergic to dairy products, all the cordon bleu cooking went by the wayside and I started cooking differently - my wife calls it Marc-cooking. It's interesting cooking, very often dairy-free but you wouldn't know it." He has been married to Adrienne Michel Long, a director of film shorts, for 14 years, and they have two children - Enzo (named after the Luc Besson character in The Big Blue) who's nine, and Skye, who's five.
During all this, he continued to convert Tinna Park to organic farming. "After mono-cropping, the soil was very tired, and desert pale. We had to build the soil up by applying thousands of tonnes of compost, farmyard manure, and grow special crops called green manures. These produce a lot of leaf to chop back into the soil to make up the humus and body. That's ongoing. In the past 10 or 12 years, the soil has been wonderful.
"We've removed all the stones, to keep the carrots straight and to keep the supermarkets happy, and I've built all the roads around the farm with the stones. We have about 42 acres in production and the rest is in forestry conservation, which is all managed organically. We grow potatoes, carrots, leeks, onions, and a multitude of herbs, beetroot, turnips, and parsnips."
Anyone obsessed with healthy eating should listen to his rather alarming views on carrots, in particular. "Carrots are one of the more dangerous things to eat if they aren't organic. People say they wash them and peel them - that's nonsense. Most non-organic seeds have been treated with pre-emergence weed killer at the seed stage. This is the type of stuff that seed-eating birds eat and become sterile and their eggs don't hatch. Birds of prey then catch these birds, and then their eggs don't hatch. We're conditioned to expect cheap food and believe we have the right to go into the supermarket and pile the trolley high. I don't want to seem pessimistic, but we are all going to pay for that some day."
Michel uses only biological control in his greenhouses. "Little midges and flies are 120 per cent effective, provided you are aware what's going on, that you are going through your plants and checking under the leaves. Once you see an aphid or a greenfly attack, you introduce the predator. You wait for an attack and then you get on the phone to Holland and order the predators. Orders must be in by Thursday and they deliver on Tuesday. It's totally effective. Ladybirds also do the business."
The Marc Michel Organic Life shop is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday. The Organic Café is open noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday (01-2011882). Both are just outside Kilpedder village, off the N11.
DOWN ON THE FARM, O'DOHERTY-STYLE
Being a city boy, my childhood memories of the farms of Ireland are limited. Sunday afternoon drives in the countryside often involved my father's obsession with manure, leaving my mother and myself like Bonny and Baby in the car with the engine running, as he raided a particularly favourite farmyard for flower-power. In those days of one-channel TV-land, if I wasn't sent to bed early, the even greater threat was being made to watch The Riordans.
Three family farm holidays, (two of which were to the same place, and all in Kerry more than 30 years ago) and two farms close to Clondalkin - Carey's farm that ran along the banks of the Grand Canal and McKeown's farm at Elmfield that I passed each morning on my way to school - offered happier memories. Unfortunately, these farms are gone, long since replaced by modern industry and housing estates. But, despite the fact that farmers continue to leave the land faster than you can say "cabbage and potatoes", others are digging in, deconstructing the old fictions of television dramas, challenging the very essence of what it means to be an Irish farmer now, and coming up with exciting new initiatives.