Look at this. Five weeks ago this glasshouse was bare. Today we’re harvesting fresh baby leaf salad — grown here in Ireland with no toxic chemicals, no herbicides, pesticides, or fungicides. Just seed, soil, and a bit of growing know-how.
Up until recently, this block of glasshouses was used for nothing but early potatoes and then tomatoes — limited crops, heavy inputs, lots of chemicals. We’re now in the first phase of converting them to an organically driven system, and as you can see, we can already grow a healthy, diverse salad crop here.
Baby leaf salads take a bit of work, but are easy enough to grow when you get the fundamentals right, so heres a question. Why don’t you see more Irish baby leaf on supermarket shelves?
Short answer: supermarkets don’t want to deal with individual Irish growers, instead they prefer to buy from global distributors that can ship vegetables and fruit from large temperature controlled warehouses where crops are consolidated, often artificially ripened and chemically treated so that they can be shipped all over. That’s why you’ll find packs of baby leaf from the UK, France, Italy, Spain — even the USA on your supermarket shelves, but very seldom from Ireland. Its also why, instead of fresh, naturally produced leaves like those we are growing, what you get are bags of chopped leaves, chemically treated to look fresh, but so nutrient-depleted and lifeless they barely deserve to be called food.
The truth is, Irish growers can and do grow quality vegetables of all sorts. We are doing it here at Bare Acre and we buy from other growers who also do it, many of them do it better than us in fact.
The problem for traditional Irish growers is one of scale. The multiples have built their system to suit high-volume, factory-farmed, often hydroponically grown greens — shelf-stable, high-input, low-cost products that maximise profit for distributors and retailers and leave the consumer with bags of green fibre containing little or none of their original nutritional value and a far cry from the naturally produced product you’d expect.
If you want less of that and more of of fresh Irish produce, it’s up to you as consumers to choose Irish-grown and Irish-produced food that supports Irish farmers, even if it means buying at the farmers’ market, going direct to the farm or joining a box scheme.
You can find out more about the Bare Acre Vegetable box scheme at https://bare-acre-farm.ooooby.org/
