Pádraig included red clover in his silage swards this year to allow him to reduce run-off of chemical N along the banks of the Greagach River, Co WaterfordĪware of these challenges, Pádraig is taking proactive steps to protect his existing wildlife habitats, which include mature native woodlands and free-growing hedgerows.
Rather than shying away, he’s diving deep into understanding the challenges we face and the role his farm can play in addressing them.Īs with grassland systems, intensification of arable systems, including the removal of hedgerows and field margins, the use of pesticides, and changes in sowing times, amongst other factors, can contribute to a rapid decline in wildlife. Pádraig’s open-mindedness and dedication, however, set him apart. Pádraig has an impressive thirst for knowledge and farms his tillage and beef enterprise with both a meticulous understanding of inputs and yields, and a flair for the avant-garde.Įmbracing change can be challenging, especially at a time when our vision of the right thing to do can be clouded by a storm of misinformation and competing agendas. One such figure is Pádraig Connery, a participant on the Footprint Farmers Programme who, since 2021, has been kindly sharing his journey in these pages. However, while embracing an ecological education may bring awareness to the painful realities of today’s biodiversity crisis, it also arms us with the best tools to tackle these challenges head-on.Īcross the country, farmers are stepping up to learn about nature and the intricate ecological systems we all depend on they are adapting and taking action to safeguard our environment and its precious biodiversity for future generations. In fact, research shows that we have lost 40% of our swift population in Ireland in just the last 10 years, largely due to a loss of nesting sites in old buildings. Learning about our swifts, swallows and house martins provides no exception – all are now threatened species and farmers are remarking that the skies are not as busy as they once were, or that there are fewer swallows returning to fill farmyards with cheery song each spring. These days, it’s difficult to learn about the exquisite creatures we share life on the farm with without also learning about the challenges that they are facing.Īs the renowned conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, “one of the penalties of an ecological education is one lives alone in a world of wounds”. The result is a stacking system not unlike that at Heathrow airport, although markedly more acrobatic. If you take a moment to look up, to really look, you’ll notice that the different species organise themselves at different levels throughout the sky: swifts hunt high, swallows low, and martins fill the space in between. Swallows, house martins and swifts all choose to visit our island to breed, before returning to Africa to spend their winter catching insects over the backs of elephants in rolling grasslands or the humming tree canopies of the Congo Basin. If you look up on a bright summer’s day, you might see a variety of birds darting through the skies over your head.
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