Nerny House Farm in Co Kildare has a different approach to traditional organic farming - one that almost defies description, writes Adrienne Murphy
Nerny House Farm in Co Kildare is forging a quiet but crucial agricultural revolution. Here, partners Deirdre O'Sullivan and Norman Kenny are achieving major success with their experiments in non-destructive, non-polluting farm practice. In the process, these modest trailblazers for sustainability are acquiring vital practical know-how about producing food without biting the hand that feeds us.
Guided by a principle of co-operation with nature as opposed to coercion, O'Sullivan and Kenny have turned their 44-acre organic farm into a garden of plenty where the needs of humans, other species and the environment are all met in a balanced, mutually enhancing way.
Since they bought what was then a derelict farmhouse with a small amount of land back in 1990, O'Sullivan and Kenny have created a thriving home and farm business that produces most of its own energy and fertility - and virtually no waste - while providing the family of two adults and three children with an empowered livelihood and lifestyle free of financial worries.
I'm greeted by a sweet, familiar smell when Deirdre O'Sullivan opens the door of her warm farmhouse kitchen. A steam machine on the cooker is extracting beehive wax. We don wellies and walk across the snowy yard to view some of the farm's bigger technology.
Soon to be put to use is a hand-weeding machine, ingenious in its simplicity. A horizontal frame consists of three "beds" side-by-side upon which the people weeding lie face-down. Spaces at the top of each bed - think of a massage couch - mean that the weeders can observe what their hands are doing as the machine is slowly pulled across the fields by a tractor, allowing fine- weeding amongst the vegetable rows. Because the tyre tracks are so deep, the tractor can be set in gear to drive along by itself, one weeder leaping up when it needs to be turned around.
"We find the weeding machine excellent," says O'Sullivan. "You can't use chemicals with organics, so there's a lot of hand-weeding, and hand-weeding you associate with being down on your hands and knees, so your back is bent and your knees are bent.
"With this machine you're lying flat instead, so your back and knees are straight. You've no strain, and your two arms and hands are free, so you quadruple the work output."
Weeding-machines like these can be built to carry 20 weeders, though O'Sullivan has one friend who weeds his crops lying on a single bed attached to four bicycle wheels. "You can even get them with sun and rain canopies," she adds.
Wind, sun and bio-diesel provide Nerny House Farm with most of its energy. "All the house electricity is on a 15-foot windmill," says O'Sullivan, "as well as some of the sheds, but we can't run the cold-store on it because it's too hard on the batteries. So the plan is that we're going to get a little diesel generator, convert it to run on vegetable oil and then we'll go off the grid completely. On days when there's no wind, the bio-diesel generator will click in." Plans are also afoot for growing rapeseed as a bio- diesel crop.
O'Sullivan points upwards as a robin pours liquid notes into the cold country air. "That's the bank of solar panels," she says, "unusual because it's freestanding. The idea is that we're going to put a tracker on it, then it'll track the sun throughout the day, turning itself automatically. The solar gives us heat and hot water for the house. We have it for a year and a half and we're really pleased with it."
Aside from a huge variety of vegetables, salad crops, potatoes, medicinal herbs and some fruit - inter-planted with flowers to attract pest-munching ladybirds - Nerny House also produces organic eggs from its 300 free-range hens who are fed on home-grown organic feed.
Attached to one of the four hen sheds situated out in the fields is a small windmill, which generates enough electricity to run the lighting (hens require it during the winter in order to lay), the automatic water system and shed doors, and the fox-deterring electric fence surrounding the hens' outdoor paddocks. A rotation system means that when the hens have eaten all the grass in one paddock, it is then rested and sown with vegetables.
"The hens are very good for eating up weed seeds and rogue potatoes," says O'Sullivan, "and for fertilising the soil, because they dung on it everyday."
A big concern for these farmers is that they export as little waste as possible. "All our paper and cardboard, waste vegetables and any hen carcasses are chopped finely in our chopping machine which can be run off the bio-diesel tractor. That is all mixed with farmyard manure collected locally, then fed to the worms in our giant wormery, which makes a really nice compost."
The run-off from the manure - stored in the farmyard - is collected through a drainage system to an underground tank, which also collects the water used to wash the farm's root vegetables. When the tank is full, this liquid is pumped into the vegetable-growing tunnels as plant feed, and thus re-incorporated into the system instead of being wasted down the drain as pollution. Household sewage is dealt with on-site via a reed-bed system which sports yellow flag irises in the summer months. The water that emerges at the end of the reed-bed is clean enough for Blue Flag status.
O'Sullivan and Kenny used to grow vegetables for supermarkets, but gave it up because of the waste entailed. "The amount of vegetables you had to grade out in order to comply," recalls O'Sullivan.
"You know supermarket vegetables, they're all standard issue, almost like they've been grown in a box: whereas when you're growing on a farm level you get carrots from 5cm to 40cm. The supermarket will only take them 18cm to 22cm, so you just throw the rest out. I lived in Africa for three years and I worked with famine people and I can't take that kind of waste."
Rather than supermarkets, Nerny House Farm now has three main local outlets for its produce: its own shop, which buys in Irish organic meat and a palette of organic fruit and vegetables from The Netherlands, and weekly stalls in Trim and Pearse Street's Dublin Food Co-Op. After selling here on Saturdays, expert multi-tasker O'Sullivan loads up the now empty van with all of the co-op's waste cardboard (destined for her farm's wormery) and the used vegetable oil (future bio-diesel) from a stall that sells freshly-cooked samosas and the like; she thus transforms other business's waste into soil and energy.
What is most impressive about Nerny House is the integrated nature of its farming system. Such thriving inventiveness is a source of hope and inspiration at a time when aggressive agribusiness is threatening small family farms and causing serious environmental degradation. Deirdre O'Sullivan also attributes the success of her farm to a system called co-creative gardening (see panel), which she claims has been most effective.
An extreme example of taking a completely different approach to a very traditional way of life.
For more information on co-creative gardening, visit www.perelandra-ltd.com
To source eco-technology, visit or call the Cultivate Centre in Dublin's Temple Bar, 01-6746415, www.sustainable.ie
Contact Nerny House Farm at 046-9553337
For years Deirdre O'Sullivan has used an unusual method called "co-creative gardening" to run her organic family farm. She hesitates before describing it, then shrugs and says: "Look, when I first came across co-creative gardening, I thought it was absolute lunacy. But heck, now it's how we manage the whole farm." Co-creative gardeners use kinesiology testing to communicate with nature spirits or "devas", enlisting their help in creating a healthy livelihood.
It's particularly useful for farmers who don't wage chemical warfare on pests. If O'Sullivan finds that pests are damaging her vegetables, she simply communicates with all the relevant stakeholders - herself andthe spirits of the plant, pest and farm - and negotiates a deal where everybody's needs are met. "We have a tithing system where we agree on a percentage of each crop to be left to one side for the rabbits and birds and insects. If there's caterpillars all over the cauliflower, I'd say why don't the caterpillars have those 60 plants and leave the rest for my customers? And the next day there are 2,000 caterpillars on the appointed plants, leaving the rest clear." Sceptics may raise an eyebrow, but O'Sullivan finds co-creative gardening, bizarre as it sounds, really does work for her farm. "It has made being an organic farmer very easy," she says.
"Before farming co-creatively, we'd have all these dreams - wind generators and solar power - but we never had the spare time or cash to achieve them. Now everything seems to fall into place and we can see that other things in our dream pipeline are very achievable."