Limerick farmers take part in new TG4 series

CAOMHNÓIRÍ na Talún, a new TG4 series from IWR Media, will follow five farmers over the course of a year as they farm with nature. 

Among these farmers is journalist and organic farmer Hannah Quinn-Mulligan from Croom who farms in partnership with her grandmother Catherine on their Limerick farm.

Hannah has been increasing habitats and trialling new farming practices to help nature. Here, beneath Tory Hill, the pair breed pedigree Hereford cattle, keep some Jerseys and now operate a micro-dairy of just four Friesian cows with a farm shop selling eggs, yoghurt and ice-cream.

Hannah has a long held interest in farming for nature. Over the years on the farm, she has maintained eight acres of wetlands as valuable habitat for birds and wildlife, put in new ponds, bird boxes for kestrel, swift and barn owl and planted a thousand oak trees. During filming, Hannah was in her first year of a National Parks and Wildlife Service farm plan scheme which encourages novel approaches to farming for the environment and one of these sees Hannah attempt to attract back otters to the farm by building an otter holt!

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Like many  farmers, Hannah also works off farm. Her other day job is as an award winning journalist and radio reporter. She writes for the Irish Times and has a weekly column in the Farming Independent. Hannah also founded the Women in Agriculture Stakeholder Group, a voluntary group that successfully campaigned for the first agricultural supports specifically for women in Ireland.

Over the course of a year, cameras follow five of these farmers as they create habitats like ponds, nettle patches or bee scrapes on their farms. 

The intensification of farming and forestry directed by policy and payments over decades, is seen as one of the most significant contributors to these losses as land use changed, as wetlands and bogs were drained and reclaimed, as pesticide use and chemical fertiliser increased or as grass management changed such as the switch from hay meadows to silage. As more and more land was brought into production, there was less and less space for wildlife. Yet if biodiversity is to improve, if habitat loss can be reversed or even halted, it is across Irish farmland that change will happen. If it’s to happen, farmers are the ones who will turn this crisis around. And across the country there’s a growing number of farmers who are forging that path and farming with nature. 

The programme will be televised on TG4 on Wednesdays at 8.30pm from September 4 onwards.