Farming:What we eat and how we produce it will profoundly influence our planet's future, writes Michael Viney
There's a last box of apples in the attic; soon we'll be left with just their sweet scent. And the squashes in their hammock are down to three. But there's still plenty outside in the garden: leeks, sprouts and cabbages and all the roots (parsnips, celeriac, carrots, swedes). And, of course, the freezer: endless tubs of ratatouille; red cabbage done with apple; sweetcorn; sliced beans; bags bulging with tomatoes like scarlet billiard balls.
Later this month it all starts again, sowing seeds in yogurt pots for my brightest window sill. Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines - lots of little plants ready for the polytunnel when it warms, around March. In autumn, when my back aches, I can wonder if the thrill will still be there next year - if all the kneeling, stooping and hauling will seem too much of a chore. But the magic works every time: the first two little leaves, the seedling reaching for the soil in a moist hole dibbled with a fingertip.
So, another year of food for a couple of ex-Dublin oldies living on their acre of windswept Co Mayo hillside. What has that to do with anything real? But green reveries of this sort seem to speak to more and more people, even those who are generations from the soil. They also fit with a wider world badly in need of reconnection: with food that is local, simple, sustainable and safe and with a much-abused earth that might still be persuaded to stay friendly.
As we dreamwalk into climate change and the slow end of cheap oil, how our food is grown, and who grows it, matters a great deal to our survival. The Irish countryside will change profoundly in any case. Between its clogged concrete arteries will be shimmering prairies of elephant grass and other energy crops, even more conifers for woodchip fuel, fields of cattle fodder (maize, alfalfa) matched to the temperatures and rainfall.
Droughts in the eastern grasslands will push the cattle west, and potato growing may have to follow them.
With any wisdom the changes in Ireland's food supply will need to make fewer demands on oil, on the atmosphere and on human health. Those 40 shades of green will not be enough for the range of plants we should grow: a real biodiversity in place of endless ryegrass pastures fed with chemical nitrogen. From vegetables, fruit and cereals to the kind of grass we feed our livestock, we must reclaim a way of life that works with nature and ecology.
"Ecological footprint" and "food miles" are phrases we are learning to feel as well as think about. The first gives us some sense of the earth, as our affluent consumption - not just of imported food but also of fuel, building stuffs, cars, computers, clothes - draws on the planet's resources and clean air: a footprint three times our share. As population and spending grow, more of our productive soil disappears under concrete.
Food miles prompt a growing feeling of complicity, as we realise how seductive the supermarket system has been. Even ordinary, familiar vegetables, fruit and herbs are imported from hundreds of miles away, often by air, to provide the same, unthinking choice of eating all year round. Insisting on organic produce is no guarantee of virtue: 70 per cent of it is imported, for a market worth €70 million. The supermarket offer of organic apples from South Africa puts us well on the path of the UK, where the organic label prompts absurd out-of-season imports: baby carrots from South Africa, broccoli from Guatemala, runner beans from Thailand.
Food transport accounts for half the carbon-dioxide emissions of the food sector; processing, packaging and farming itself share the rest. Rising fuel costs and concern about aerial pollution may put an end to the worst nonsense of air-freighting fresh produce and flowers halfway round the world (not, as many people think, in the cargo holds of passenger aircraft but in dedicated freight aircraft). Bulk shipping will continue, assisted by solar, perhaps nuclear, energy and high-tech sails, but not to bring strawberries from California or blueberries from New Zealand.
Peak oil and the carbon-dioxide crisis are both signals for changes in Irish farming. The pressure already exists for cutting back on chemical fertilisers made from oil and natural gas. Quite apart from rising cost, they pollute air and water, degrade the soil and greatly diminish, in feeding ryegrass monocultures, the countryside's natural diversity of plants and insects.
In Europe generally, organic farming is helping to reshape agricultural policy. As the Green Party leader, Trevor Sargent, has put it: "Other countries in the EU view organics as the next stage in sustainable farming, whereas our Government labours under the notion that the organic sector is . . . slightly exotic, like ostrich farming."
But most Irish farmers see it in much the same way or, perhaps more insidiously, as a throwback to "peasant" farming. The expert Agri Vision 2015 committee, advising the Minister on agricultural policy, played down the prospects for a wide switch to organics. It found even open-minded farmers put off by the cost of conversion and the slow development in marketing. "For as long as price is the principal determinant of choice for the vast majority of consumers," it concluded, "organic production will not offer a feasible, competitive solution for the majority of Irish farmers."
Despite extra payments under the rural environment protection scheme, there are still only about 1,000 organic farms in the Republic, and the great bulk of organic hectares are livestock grassland, with not much more than 300 hectares of vegetables.
Bord Bia promotes the marketing, organic organisations handle standards of production and Teagasc, the State's farming advisory agency, offers training and research.
Teagasc doesn't make the switch sound easy - and rightly so. It takes two years to let the soil and its organisms recover from what may be decades of an artificial chemical regime. For organic livestock farmers on grassland, clover takes over the nitrogen supply by fixing it from the atmosphere. Rotation with cereals provides straw bedding for the animals, and there's an end to routine, preventative dosing with drugs - good husbandry is meant to keep them healthy. Recycled manure plays a part on all organic farms, but compost, seaweed and "green manures" also help feed the soil of fruit and vegetable growers. For them, a ban on chemical weedkillers and pesticides makes some of the extra work that pushes up organic prices.
All this, as John Feehan of University College Dublin points out, calls for "a new intelligence and a new sensitivity", not to mention a better use of science. Farming in Ireland, his monumental history, has shown how traditional knowledge and feeling for the land were overwhelmed by reliance on outside expertise and a specialised science largely at the service of big business. As their produce was trucked to distant markets, farmers even stopped producing much food for themselves. Two-thirds now have no nominated successor, in an Ireland where working the land is widely seen as a job for the second rate. The loss of idealism, says Feehan, is often linked to a quiet despair among the rural young.
He talks of farming needing a "mystique", an affinity for land that comes close to patriotism. In the organic movement the "mystique" is more often an idealistic devotion to working with, and nourishing, the land in ways that fit with the rest of nature. That may not sound like an ethos readily discovered at the counter of the average rural pub. For an example, I go to a new book by the highly regarded American author Michael Pollan. In The Omnivore's Dilemma, a revelatory exploration of the workings of the US food chain, he records an organic farmer's refinement of the rotation of grazing cattle. After they've been moved from one paddock to the next and their cowpats have attracted insects, he sends in a wagon full of hens. They tear apart the cowpats to eat the fly grubs - a feast of protein that goes into rich and tasty eggs - and in the process clear the pasture of potential cattle parasites.
It's a different way of thought - and one that, in Ireland, is often the passion of outsiders, settlers from Britain and Europe, for whom it is part of a philosophy of local self-sufficiency. Not for nothing does Co Cork stand out in its number of farmers' markets - 20 of them, and another dozen in Co Kerry - and in the quality and variety of local artisan products, such as farmhouse cheeses.
Perhaps we should be helping more strongly motivated settlers to take the lead in the conversion to organic vegetables and livestock. As part-time farming becomes the norm for most Irish landowners in the west, more and more land will go to loss in scrub or disappear under conifers. It deserves to produce local food, generating local income, local pride. Land lease, joint venture - whatever the mechanism, we need to find it.
Meanwhile, the quickest way to local food that cuts out at least a few shelves of the supermarket is to grow it ourselves organically. It doesn't need an acre (most of ours is under trees or bramble thickets) or even a polytunnel. It does need an openness to rediscovery of what soil is about, of how to keep plants happy and of the workings of the insect network. To quote Pollan: "The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world."
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for the Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World, by Michael Pollan, is published by Bloomsbury, £12.99 in UK