This post is a follow-up one month into a challenge that Husband and I set ourselves to eat exclusively locally for one year. If you missed it, you can go back and read my introduction to our challenge here: A Challenge: putting my money where my mouth is
We are a month into our challenge of eating exclusively from local soil, and quite honestly, nothing much has changed for us. We continue to eat much the same as we have for the last several years, foods that keep us strong, fit and connected, able bodied and able minded for the work we do; foods that keep us connected to the source of our sustenance, the land, our community. My focus here on Substack is on the land and our human connection to it; food is a big part of that and a big part of the conversation around farming. Food is why we farm, and food is what connects us all back to the land.
We eat simple, nourishing fare: meats of all kinds and cuts, much of it raised on our own farm, stews simmered on the bone to unctuous umami, or roasts with sweet carrots and baby onions, occasional spuds with lashings of golden, cultured butter from the dairy down the road, seafood and salt harvested off our pristine North Atlantic coast—we live in a land of fertile soils and temperate climate where a wide variety of meat and vegetable foods grow, and we have eaten mostly local and Irish grown for years. We both are at our healthiest eating meat based with a very little veg and hadn’t eaten grains or processed foods for years until recently. But, given how hectic our life has been over the past year and our lack of a decent, equipped kitchen, some conveniences and quick fixes had crept in, and we were both feeling the effects of aching joints and tired old bones and generally struggling to keep up with the work. This challenge has been as much about us getting back on track in health and in our bodies as anything. We work hard, and we ain’t no spring chickens who can run all day on Snickers and air; we need to fuel our bodies with real, deep nourishment for the strength and endurance that our lifestyle and our long term health require. I want to still be shearing sheep and hiking over our hills, whacking in fence posts and wrestling bears a decade and on from now. (Alright, I made that last bit up, we don’t have bears, but you get my drift).
We began our challenge by writing out a list of specific foods, and shops and producers whose produce we already know is locally grown. Our focus is immediately tuned to the bounty of all that we can have, not what we can’t. Even when I studied nutrition and was certified as a women’s health coach, dieting, or denial of nourishment, was not in my vocabulary. Focus on abundance, and abundant you shall feel. We quickly filled an A4 sheet with all the local produce and producers we could think of. And we quickly saw a theme of a few foods repeating over and over: beef, butter, cheese, cream, strawberries, honey. Unsurprising, given that we are mostly a nation of grass farmers, they don’t call us the Emerald Isle for nothing, and I don’t know about you, but I could happily live on that list and want for nothing.
Then we took a drive around our locality, looking for spuds. We’re still kinda new to this immediate locality and sussing out where we can source what, the closer the better. Apparently we were a bit early on our spud hunt. Either I’m out of touch, this season was especially hard or late, or nobody’s growing spuds this year. After vainly driving around looking for spud-stocked farm stands for an hour or so, I had to do a quick double check on what country we’re living in and which month of the year new potatoes are harvested—no local spuds could be found. In the weeks since then, we’ve found tons of wonderful, local enough, new season potatoes in all the butcher shops, reminding us of the deep seasonality of eating locally.
We’ve been supporting our two regular butchers who both raise their own beef and run their own small, on-farm abattoirs where we’ve had animals processed, for years. It is and has always been important to me to know where my food comes from, how it was raised, what it was fed, how its life ended, by whose hands, how and by whom it was processed after harvest, what has been added or taken out, how far it was transported. That is, ultimately, why we farm.
We already produce a substantial amount of our food from our own farm. Our sheep, being what grows best on our thin, ericaceous soil, are our mainstay, our staff of life. We’re now working our way through our last freezer of last year’s harvest and beginning to stock them with this year’s. One and a half big hogget ewes and two small hogget rams have already made their way in to replenish our stores, finished fit and fat and sweet on mountain grass, heather, and spring rain. By the end of this season we’ll be adding four small fat lambs and a couple of older, mutton ewes to join them, to see us through the winter (our own freezers are filled first, always, and then anything we have to harvest beyond our own needs is sold to bring a bit back to the farm). Our goats give more than enough milk for our needs in addition to raising their own kids, and occasional kid meat or goat mutton to complement our yield of sheep meat. We can barely keep up with our laying ducks and I have preserved a bounty of duck eggs using the waterglass method to see us through any seasonal lulls in their production. We don’t keep chickens anymore, but sometimes trade duck eggs for chicken eggs with friends, for a change. Three ducks are now brooding their clutches and, sooner or later, there will be too many duck ravaging young drakes that will need to be culled (drakes have a formidable sexual appetite, seriously) so they, too, will make their way to our freezers.
We will probably get a side of beef come summer’s end when the cattle are fat on pasture, from either of our butchers or any one of many pasture raised and organic beef producers around us. The hills our farm sits among are sheep country, but the valleys and lowlands surrounding are rich and green and that’s beef and dairy land. A side of beef does the Husband and I for a year, alongside our own mutton and lamb and occasional pastured poultry or pork when we can get it.
I cook with and add butter to just about every meal. Beautiful, golden butter churned from yellow cream off the lush green pastures of a local dairy farm that also sells said yellow cream and fresh, non-homogenised milk off their Jersey and Fresian herd from the farm shop. That or cultured butter from the famous Toonsbridge dairy down along the valley—cow, goat, sheep and buffalo dairy products are all on our local menu.
We let our vegetable and herb garden at our last property go a few years ago and turned the ground and polytunnels over to sheep. Note: when you’re on heavy clay, raising lamb is a lot less backbreaking labour than raising spuds. Also of note: the life, fertility and workability that sprang back to the compacted, worn out, lifeless soil we inherited on that little patch of silage ground after just a couple of years of only running grazing livestock over it was phenomenal, enough to write an essay on… But, I digress. We’re making plans to start a new garden here, down on our lower ground where the better soil is, but that’s a way off and a lot of work ahead of us so for now the small amount of veg and fruit we eat has to be sourced from within the thirty-five mile radius we set for our challenge. This has proved to require a little more effort than the ease and abundance of sourcing meat and dairy, and until we figure out our means of storage and food preservation (my current kitchen and larder, a.k.a. our hut on the hill, is very cramped and basic) it means eating strictly seasonally; we buy only what is fresh and available that we can use quickly. So when Husband comes home with an armful of freshly pulled onions with mud on their roots and still on their green stalks, we fry them up in lashings of that golden butter and eat them with our deep orange-yolked, heather-imbued duck eggs and buttery new season potatoes that we hunted for, topped with locally panned Atlantic sea salt and buffalo cheddar from the valley. Humble egg and chips becomes a meal fit for the most discerning foodie when it’s homegrown and fresh from the soil.
I come from a family of gardeners and homesteaders, our blood runs green. I grew up in and eating from a beautiful garden, and I worked for the best part of a decade in the gardens of a private estate, overseen by my mum, where part of my duties were the day to day running of a very productive vegetable garden. I have a pretty good idea of what vegetables and fruits will and won’t grow here, and what goes into the growing of them. We can easily grow all brassicas (cabbage family), at scale. We can grow peas and green beans, spinach and chard, beetroots and pumpkins and squash, tomatoes and peppers (under cover), lettuce and all sorts of salad leaves, apples, pears, plums, grapes, gooseberries, blackcurrants, blueberries… the list goes on.
Yet a stroll down the supermarket fruit and veg aisle reading the origin labels tells a different story, that even the most basic staples that grow well and easily in our fertile soils and temperate climate are imported from afar: onions from Spain, garlic all the way from China (irradiated enroute), carrots and cabbages from Holland, unseasonal blueberries from Morocco or South America, salads and cheap strawberries from Spain sitting right next to the beautiful, but more expensive, strawberries grown on the farm just down the road. Shockingly little fruits or vegetables are grown locally (on a large commercial scale). But take a look along the southern coast of Almeria on Google Maps, you will see the sprawling metropolis of plastic hothouses growing produce in a chemical soup laboured by cheap, migrant workers, and that is where much of the fresh produce labelled from Spain on Irish (and UK and much of Europe’s) supermarket shelves comes from. It’s cheaper and makes more money for the middlemen to import produce so we can have our cheap strawberries and out of season greens and keep the wheels of the Big Machine rolling than to pay a fair rate to farmer John down the road who’s struggling to keep his business afloat against labour costs and food business red tape regulations.
Even when we do manage to upscale, it’s cheaper to pay migrant workers than our own. During the covid lockdowns, when all of us were detained in our homes under strict travel restrictions and couldn’t travel more than 2km from our homes or visit our families (except on business deemed by the powers-that-be to be “essential”), a large scale Irish strawberry producer caused an uproar for flying in strawberry pickers from overseas, while Irish people stayed locked indoors having lost their jobs to lockdowns. The thing is, I don’t think farmers and producers can always be blamed for having to find the cheapest labour they can (and certainly nor can the workers who come to work for better pay than they can get at home and often under horrendous conditions). As anyone who farms or grows their own knows, the costs of growing good food far outweigh the costs reflected in supermarket prices and the price most people are willing to pay. Our farm makes no money; if we look at it as a business we’re running at a massive annual loss. We price our half lamb boxes in line with other producers of a similar quality selling direct to consumer; it is barely enough to cover the costs of raising and having the animal butchered nevermind paying us a wage for our labour, and yet we’ve been told our meat is too expensive—we cannot come close to supermarket prices (this could lead into a-whole-nother conversation on the conundrum of ethics, farming and making a living, but I’ll come back to that another time). It’s a system that is designed to divide and keep the richest pockets lined, and it takes a brave and innovative farmer to resist the shackles of the system, stay afloat and stay their own way. Those are the kind of farmers I want to support: the small farmers, local farmers, and the think-outside-the-box farmers who are working to restore communities, local food systems and land.
Back to knowing our farmers. Part of this Challenge was to make us cut out the convenience of the supermarket middleman and get out there to find, get to know, and directly support our farmers. We know first hand how hard it is to make a living from farming. If we can go direct and pay our farmers a fair price for their produce, they might in turn be able to pay a fair wage to their workers, provide jobs to local people, keep our communities strong and thriving. Keep our soils strong and thriving. Food localisation is, I believe, the key to restoring communities, soils, land and farming systems, keeping small farmers on the land and land sovereignty in local hands. Money makes the world go round, indeed, but whose world? I say all this as humbly as I can, as a mother who has known the very real struggle of putting food on the table, doing the best I could. We are all caught up in the same trap, and we can all only do the best we can within our means. But it’s also about priorities. If we can afford our iPhones and comfortable homes, we can afford to pay our farmers a fair price for our food. Our experience has also been that when we put in the effort to find and cultivate a relationship with small producers, butcher shops, etc, they really appreciate and reciprocate us generously for our support. Gifts of sweetbreads from the butcher’s bucket (that's where the good stuff is), stock bones and suet come for free.
A stroll around our local farmer’s market on any summer’s day, in contrast to the bland, plastic-wrapped uniformity of the supermarket aisles, reveals the variety and abundance of local produce grown by the hands of small-scale, local producers, and it’s easy to see that we don’t need to eat imported foods at all. Like I‘ve said, we’ve been eating majoritively locally and Irish grown for years. Mouthwateringly sweet baby turnips complete with complimentary greens for my goats, tender spears of asparagus, big leafy bunches of rainbow chard, baby courgettes cut from the vine that very morning with their showy, orange flowers on that are delicate and delicious battered and fried. Oh, and buckets of spuds! (I don’t even like spuds that much, but they’re a handy delivery vehicle for all that glorious butter). We buy chicken from Dave who’s always good for a cheery chat in spite of his ailing health that the whole market knows all about. Dave’s chicken is double the price of a supermarket free range bird, as it should be. Dave’s chicken ate bugs on green grass and felt the sun and the rain on her feathered back and scratched in soil. Dave gives me a friendly grin and asks how my mum is as he thanks me for the trade that I know is directly supporting him, his farm and his family—and that is what community is made of.
Our bodies are not separate from the body of the Earth. We are made of minerals and mud, the blood and skeletons of all the life that came before us; our bones, skin, hair, muscles, fingernails and blood are built of the soils our food was grown in and built on the labour of those who grew and harvested it. A fair exchange, then, of cash and gratitude, nourishment for livelihood, hand to hand.
There are a few foods we can’t have, either because they can’t be or simply aren’t grown here: tropical fruits, dried pulses and beans, breads, pastas and grains. Foods we do well without, anyway. There is a grain mill locally processing oatmeal, but I have yet to find out whether their oats are grown in local soil. We are in a too wet part of the country for growing a lot of grains, and as far as I know, the small amount of grain grown locally goes to animal feed or to our thriving local brewing industry. We can have meat and beer, but not bread, and that’s OK with us.
So much "food for thought" in this article. And so relevant at a time when the powers that be are trying to control the population via food choices and lining the pockets of corporate farmers and distributors. I cannot applaud you enough for creating the roadmap for all of us to follow to eat local and at the same time improve our own health and well being. I am trying to walk a similar path, giving up processed food and at the same time supporting local farmers. And in the year in doing so, focusing my diet on locally grown meats, raw unpasteurized milk and butter, local veggies, I have gotten rid of IBS, and lost 35 pounds. But we are fighting the good fight here in Central Virginia. The Virginia Department of Agriculture has raided my local Amish farmer for processing and butchering his own livestock and selling directly to consumers. To get around the ill thought out laws, his customers sign a contract to partially own his livestock so we have a legal right to the meat and milk. But the powers that be prefer growers use USDA sanctioned butchers who are required to douse the meat in chlorine solutions. This is unacceptable to me and my gut. Most of our butchers are owned by 4 big corporations in the US..so it is a racket to line the pockets of the elite. All of us in Samual's (our Amish farmer) buying club are standing up for him and writing our local and state government officials. So thank you for your article...I am sharing with my friends.