Kildare farmers take part in fascinating new TG4 series
Norman Dunne examining soil quality on his tillage farm in Co Kildare
A new TG4 series follows five farmers – including two from Kildare – over the course of a year as they farm with nature.
Norman and his father Micheal Dunne from Maynooth feature in .
When he was a kid, Norman remembers flocks of seagulls and other birds following the plough for worms on the family’s farm, but by the time he returned to farming in his thirties, things had changed dramatically.
“We’d turnover slabs of soil; there were no worms, no life and we just seemed to have to beat the soil harder and harder, need bigger machinery, more horsepower to get it [the soil] into the shape we needed it in for a seed bed… so that didn’t scale up in my mind,” he said.
In 2019, Norman and his dad began to convert the farm to a regenerative or conservation agriculture approach; first about 10% of the farm and eventually the rest of their 400 acres.
The series sees Norman attempt to rebuild fertility and life in the soil after decades of intensive tillage on their heavy clay soils. He now direct drills or minimal till, plants multi-species summer cover crops to build fertility and enhance the soil structure and uses bio-seed dressings (an idea from Korean natural farming) to prime the seed before sowing. And since introducing these regenerative methods, biodiversity has increased.
“There are birds here now that I have never seen or heard on the farm before. There seems to be a new bird every year, some of them are red-listed,” he said.
Barn owls, skylarks, kestrels, yellow hammers all found habitats here and in 2022, much to Micheal and Norman’s delight, the cuckoo returned. For their efforts, Norman and Micheal have won the Farming for Nature People’s Choice Award in 2021 and last year Norman won the RDS Spring Awards for sustainable agriculture.
