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FACING A FODDER CRISIS
ABOVE: Carraig Dúlra’s greenhouse. Suzie describes their core ethos as simply wanting to live as deeply connected to and respectful of nature and human beings as possible. “That, of course, is easier said than done in the modern world, with our four nearly-grown children to support, and in a country where financial risks are plentiful and supports few and subject to constant change,” she says.
INSPIRED BY NATURE
Mike is originally from New York but spent his college years in the forests of New England. As a young man, he read the seminal environmental books of the 1970s that catalysed many to become more environmentally active. That became his own life goal. Suzie’s family were her primary influencers: her father and grandfather were keen home vegetable growers. She also had uncles in pig and dairy farming and aunts on small holdings in Dorset and Aberdeenshire, and spent time on a Camphill biodynamic farm in Northern Ireland.
Her family loved spending time in nature. Throughout her childhood they camped and hiked, something Mike and Suzie wanted for their own family life. They too have hiked and camped with their children at home and on big family trips around Europe, the USA and on a charity rally to Mongolia. However, their early careers were not in farming. Mike initially worked in IT and Suzie in creative arts, community facilitation and art therapy. In 1998, Suzie started to volunteer in her children’s school helping to design and create a productive nature-friendly garden with wildflowers, different habitats and organic vegetables. Later Suzie set up and taught in community gardens. It was at this point that permaculture became the design toolkit for her projects.
Permaculture is an ecologically-friendly agricultural system and a model way of growing food and managing a garden. It’s efficient, sustainable and relatively low in energy. In business speak, it maximises yield and minimises waste, allowing nature to do all of the hard work. But few people practice it and those who do are mostly on the fringes. “Permaculture is a systemic design framework inspired by ecology and created by Bill Mollison and David Holgrem in the 1970s,” Suzie explains. “It has been used since to design sustainable resource use and resilient communities around the world.”
Mike and Suzie decided to set up a social enterprise to pioneer these ideas. There were only a few permaculture practitioners in Ireland at the time and Carraig Dúlra – organic and permaculture education and research project – was launched in 2007 on a 3.8 acre scrub field near Glenealy, Co Wicklow. It was an enormous task but Suzie and Mike took advantage of great mentoring and support by partnering on some projects early on such as The Organic Centre and Irish Seed Savers. In the last ten years, Carraig Dúlra has been a place for experimentation, learning and many conversations with visitors about sustainable production and living. Suzie and Mike have completed numerous outreach projects in their wider community with school gardens, community gardens, local food initiatives like OOOOBY (Out Of Our Own Back Yard), now called Edible Education, as well as sustainable community actions like Transition Towns.
“Every initiative we’ve started or been part [of] is value-led,” Suzie explains. “Permaculture has a set of ethical principles that many people are attracted to and want to help bring about in the world. These are summarised as earth care, people care and fair share.”
As Carraig Dúlra started off on very marginal, poor and degraded land, it was a great proving ground for regenerative agriculture. For ten years Mike, Suzie and a huge number of volunteers (or as they are known in the USA, service learners) from Ireland and abroad have invested considerable time and energy in the project. “They’ve all brought inputs of money, time and energy and local carbon waste streams into this regeneration of the ecology of the site, its soil, building social capital through community actions and events, and knowledge capital in their own and their wider community,” says Suzie.
Other enterprises fit as neatly into their special eco-system. Suzie and Mike have run courses, open days, and given talks in a wide range of permaculture-related activities or techniques. They work with local and national organisations and partnerships, including GIY, Community Gardens Ireland, WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), Kildare and Wicklow ETB, County Wicklow Partnership, Common Ground Bray, Wicklow Transition and Tiny Homes groups. There is a kind of harmony at work here. The 3.8 acre site now has a young native woodland of almost 2,000 trees on 1.75 acres, a pond, a swale system to hydrate the soil and move nutrients throughout the system, a maturing forest garden or food forest (which is a kind of super orchard) on about 0.75 acres, and roughly the same area of organic vegetable gardens, with a small amount of poultry and honeybees integrated into the system. There is also a cob barn and field kitchen built from local waste resources and subsoil and rocks from the site, as well as some renovated buildings purchased and repaired from nearby, including a large greenhouse, and a portacabin farm library full of all the books that have influenced the designs and projects.
“We produce apples, apricots, nectarines, kiwis, plums, nuts, many types of wild and cultivated berries, herbs, and many types of vegetables, some quite specialised, as well as duck and hen eggs and some honey,” says Suzie. “We supply ourselves, our wider family, other local small producers through a sharing cooperative, volunteers, course participants, a small box scheme that grew out of the OOOOBY initiative, and local restaurants.”
They continue to use permaculture design to develop and regenerate a living ecosystem towards its fullest expression, one that in turn supports a resilient local culture. “Past visitors and participants have taken the learning from Carraig Dúlra and started their own projects or applied permaculture to existing farms around Ireland,” Suzie adds. “We hope that they take the concepts and deepen the practice of permaculture in Ireland. If you are a good teacher your students go further than you.”
Suzie explains that she and Mike will continue to try things out but also consolidate and reflect on what they have learned. She would love to document their experiences better than she does at present in her occasional blogs and vlogs, perhaps compiling a book or short documentary. There’s plenty of content – after all, the pair have collaborated with other permaculture practitioners across the country in designing and implementing each step of the project, many of whom teach on their once-a-year flagship permaculture design certificate course. The couple also initiated and are continuing to support the All Ireland Permaculture Gathering and the loose permaculture network of Ireland, which hosted the European Permaculture Convergence this year in Wicklow.
Looking back, not everything at Carraig Dúlra has gone without a hitch. “There have been plenty of challenges to working from such a different world-view to the prevailing one of consumption without consideration for the consequences of our consumption for nature and other humans,” she says. “We have a lot of passion, as well as dogged persistence. We started small and learned from our failures and successes. We’ve reached out into larger spaces and other arenas when welcomed.”
Suzie and Mike come across as people with a practical vision that could have far-reaching effects. The last decade is an example of the result of hard work and determination, and how sustainable practices can result in a resilient and more harmonious environment and bring people and communities together. “This is kind of human ecology, full of connections and networking exchanges,” Suzie concludes, “mirrors the natural web of resilience of the land with all its connected elements exchanging inputs and outputs in a regenerated sustainable circular system.”
Suzie Cahn
