Joe Kelly is an organic horticulture grower and beef farmer in Co. Mayo and he has participated in various iterations of the Organic Farming Scheme (OFS) over the years. His produce never leaves the county of Mayo and therefore has an extremely low food miles footprint. His customers are hotels and restaurants in Castlebar, Westport and Kiltimagh.

Joe cannot remember when he was not a farmer. Even at 5 years of age he remembers going out to the farm to help his father when he came home from school. After completing agricultural college, he remembers coming home full of ideas on how to intensify the agricultural production on the farm which was the fashion at the time. He started by reseeding the old meadows with ryegrass swards and finished by setting up an indoor piggery. Over the years, he concluded that ryegrass monocultures were unsuitable for his type of farm and the pigs were too financially volatile. Joe came to believe that he needed to work with nature rather than against it and, in 2009, he decided to transition to organic farming.  

Switching to organic farming with support from the Organic Farming Scheme has helped a 36 acre farm with heavy soils in the west of Ireland to become a viable enterprise for Joe to make a living.  The farm now has a two acres of crop rows and poly-tunnels for organic vegetables, and the rest is devoted to beef cattle or to habitat under the new Agri-Climate Rural Environment Scheme (ACRES).  Most of the new habitat created on the farm will be in the form of hedgerows. 

Joe also works two days a week in Westport as a masseuse and he is a registered Social Farmer with Social Farming Ireland. He has hosted participants who are engaged with various kinds of social services and want to experience farming life. While these diverse income streams keep Joe busy, they also help to provide financial resilience for his farm. 

The family of Joe Kelly (on his father’s side) has been farming the same piece of land since at least the 1700’s. An interest in horticulture is something that has passed down through the Kelly bloodline. Joe still has a medal that his father won for Best Vegetable Grower at the Claremorris Horseshow in 1933. His father also participated in a scheme to grow raspberries that was set up after the Second World War due to a lack of fruit in the country. He grew raspberries for 40 years, supplying Lamb Brothers in Dublin. The farm has always had cattle and sheep although the sheep are gone now because it was hard to keep lambs from escaping through fences and getting into the vegetables.  

Joe first seriously considered organic farming over ten years ago. “A friend of mine had been talking about organics for years,” Joe remembers, “within a week of the scheme opening, I was signed up, while the friend took another year before he signed up!”  Organic farming turned out to be a perfect fit for Joe, and he has never looked back.

Joe has finished receiving his higher conversion payment long ago but continues to receive his maintenance and annual participation payments by continuing to participate in the Organic Farming Scheme. “The conversion payments were a big help.  You have to watch your stocking rate for a while, until the microbial life builds up in the soil.  When you stop spreading chemical fertiliser, the land is asking ‘what is going on here?’  It takes at least a year and a half for the soil to get used to it,” Joe reckons.  

He has seen a lot of positive changes on his farm over the years since switching to organic farming. “I no longer have to worry about paying out for sprays and fertilisers. I no longer have to worry about runoff into waterways. The insects and the bees around the place are in the prime of their health. The honey that I get from my honeybees doesn’t have a bit of poison in it,” he states proudly.

When asked about the future of the organic sector in Ireland, Joe is extremely optimistic. He believes that it will continue to grow quickly. “I think it’s a no brainer, there’s nowhere else to go,” he says about the possibility of more conventional farmers switching to organic farming.

The Organic Farming Scheme is available right now with generous supports for farmers who want to be part of the movement towards organic farming in Ireland.