Our Cork 2040: Reimagining agriculture
Making space for women and LGBTQI+ people in farming is part of a move away from the "heavily mechanised and masculine processes" of current farming practice, writes Maitiú Mac Cárthaigh.
It’s part four of Our Cork 2040: another interesting perspective on the future of city and county.
Cork city is set to double in size by 2040 under the government’s Project Ireland 2040 plans, with huge impacts not only on city-dwellers but on the whole county.
With these ambitious plans comes lots of talk of “stakeholders.” This often seems to mean private developers, multinational employers and politicians. But who really holds a stake in the future of Cork? We believe it’s the people who live, work, raise families and face all of life’s challenges here.
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Our Cork 2040: Maitiú MacCárthaigh
Maitiú MacCárthaigh comes from a farming background and is a recent graduate of the BA (Hons) Fine Art in Crawford College of Art and Design MTU. Their work focuses on the Rurality, labour, Agri-Gender and Queer existence in these spaces. Maitiú will soon be continuing their research and art practice in the Hague, the Netherlands to a Masters level at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK). Maitiú’s website is here.
A completely different agricultural sector, beyond the “lonely male farmer.”
By Cork 2040, I want to imagine a completely different agricultural sector, but this is difficult, considering where we are currently.
I want agriculture to be considered as more than just the production of food, but the realm of living. I want it to become a place which focuses on the inclusion of others, beyond the lonely male farmer.
This new mechanised tradition of agriculture we have invented cannot be sustained. It contaminates and erodes the land and can do much worse to the people who work it. In 2040, I am trying to see an inclusive tradition coming to the fore, a sector which works with the land and not against it, with a workforce that doesn’t represent just the old male portrait but includes more women and members of the LADTAG+/LGBTQI+ community. (LADTAG+ is Irish for LGBTQI+)
Could we make the jump back to a more sustainable and communal system of agriculture? What if we utilised the tools and advanced systems of production we now have to ease pressures on the body and the land? To make it to this vision of 2040 a reality, a lot must change. But hopefully, the shift we are seeing now is the first step towards it.
Reused jam jars: the “softness of rurality.”
A few weeks ago, I was at my Nana’s and for her 80th birthday she had received a basket of beautifully packaged and wrapped natural and organic foods.
We sorted through the bundle of things and came across a bottle of elderberry syrup. My Nana didn’t want it, so it was pawned off on me, to my delight. I knew what it was, and knew elderberry could be very good for your immune system, signalled by its regal purple colour. It came from a tree feared for its association with the Sí. But something other than that wasn’t sitting right with me.
Where have I had this before?
Eventually the vague memory of a jam jar with a handwritten note on it popped up in my mind. At some point when I was younger, a neighbour would go house to house delivering these small, reused jars filled with the elixir. Written on the side was the dosage and when it was made. No more, no less. There was something magical about the mysterious jars and the sweet thick syrup inside them.
This little jar of softness was short and still had the glue from the previous sticker speckled around the glass. Remembering this made the new, tall bottle, designed to look rustic, seem cold, distant and alien. I was put off by it.
Much of what drives my research and art practice is the new idea that Irish and Western Agriculture must push the land for as much as it can give.
It seems the more we advance, the more farming becomes a practice of heavily mechanised and masculine processes which infect and poison the land. A new way of life, which makes the agricultural subservient and actively throws off more sustainable means of production, in the pursuit of short-lived profit.
Since I was younger, I have seen a rapid decline in the appearance of these jam jars or walks across fields to the shop for sweets.
These are acts which don’t show our connection to the land, but how we live communally with it, and in it. Although the retreat from the land began long before I was born, I wonder has the process been accelerated by our mass mechanisation of farming, or where we already in the final throws of our separation? Where are we in the landscape anymore? Are we really its custodians, if we are so removed from it?
Recently I learned of the new technological advances made to agricultural production in the Netherlands. Giant green houses with remotely driven tractors scattered across the landscape, producing food with UV light and micromanaged environments to yield the highest quality, with the least impact on the natural resources. It’s an idea which seems to be working, but my blood pressure rises when I think of this solely scientific approach in an Irish context.
As a nation with already tenuous and painful connections to the land, what would happen if one day we built houses of glass and left our landscape? Would it be the end point to our connection to the land or would it signify our return to understanding it? Could it be the push back against our relatively new means of production?
I have always felt great unease when in the male sphere of agriculture. It is not the dirt, oil, or rotting meat but the energy that resonates from a male’s role. I fall victim to the notion that the male controls the farm. The supposed sense of communal work and understanding with the land is always pushed aside in this newly emerged exclusively male space.
In this space, most of us are the other.
The gifting of reused jam jars, a box of brown scones or homebrewed elderflower wine show me the softness of rurality. They are overlooked niceties which seem like ancient practices. Quick treats and remedies from others to others.
Stepping back and considering where we are environmentally, it is ever more evident we exist in a society with the technology and skills to survive alongside the land, but we choose not to. We have decided to continue to allow current means of production be our status quo and anything other is unthinkable.
Through the persistence of the modern means of production, we are cutting ourselves off from everything else. Agriculture becomes a cold and failing sector. Generationally we are at a crossroads, as we can see a rising amount of woman and members of the LGBTQIA+ communities beginning to carve out a space for themselves in this world. Are we slowly and painfully moving away from an increasingly toxic relationship with the land?
An agriculture “at war with itself”
Yet around us, agriculture seems to be at war with itself. One week you can see an organic farmer in Galway using an ox to plough the fields on Nationwide, the next, a 1,000-herd dairy farmer meeting with acclaim across the country. It’s a worrying chasm to be on either side of.
In The Netherlands, I was at an outdoor event where I spoke to someone who repeatedly told me they believed that regardless of soil quality, they would always prefer a carrot grown in the ground rather than one in an artificial setting. The statement has merit, but I can’t escape the fear of how we treat the soil and believe that we can kick it to hell and back, and it will always be there for us. How can a carrot grown in pesticide-abused soil be better than one grown in a greenhouse?
The aim of the Dutch glass factory farms is to feed 10 billion people, or at least that’s what they advertise.
We are at a point where we must decide to either continue destroying our environment and move to indoor artificial farming, or to move to more sustainable means of production, coupled with these new artificial techniques.
As an example, Glanbia has announced by 2030 they aim to “reduce carbon intensity by 30%” under their Living Proof sustainability strategy. They won’t be building greenhouses just yet, but it is a start towards being carbon neutral by 2050.
A gender balance?
Reading the strategy, there are the usual aims of responsibly sourced foodstuffs, all packaging to be recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 but what interests me is they aim to create a 50:50 female to male representation in leadership roles by 2030.
For me, this is important, but still unusual.
I can’t help but look at these aims with a suspicious eye.
How many times have promises like this never come to fruition?
Maybe I am wrong to not trust the changes being made. Even though they are moves towards a more sustainable and inclusive agriculture sector, I can’t escape the conditioning my brain has gone through. That the farm revolves around the male. Always has, always will. Much like with the glue-speckled jam jar, I feel unsettled by the new aims. And at this point, this is wrong of me.
This may be why so many in the sector fear Europe and its plans for small farmers. We are too used to this system of farming and are terrified to go back to what we had before. A cleaner and more sustainable system, but also a system which broke backs and aged people beyond their years.
A sustainable and inclusive system
The tall, clean bottle of Elderberry seems to be the look of the future.
Maybe I can shake these qualms and see that this reimagining and renewed interest is the way forward. It is the product of someone looking back and bringing with us what we once did, and this isn’t a bad thing. It is a break in the cycle of acceptance. Accepting that things cannot change.
Maybe we won’t see glasshouses and remote-control tractors covering the landscape, but a shift is coming.
Hopefully towards a more sustainable and inclusive system, an agricultural sector which understands you can’t push and push and push and never give back.
A system that utilises things like elderberry and seaweed.
A system that allows the communal idea of the people to live within the land.
A space far away from the crippling realities we see on the news all too frequently.
Great article