Westmeath farmer’s sustainability efforts feature in new art project

The measures that a Westmeath farmer has put in place to improve sustainability feature in a thought-provoking and exciting new sound and visual art project that is set to tour Ireland.

The Quickening is a multi-channel film and sound installation that explores the actions that must be taken around farming, food production and consumption in the face of present ecological and climate crises and among those who contributed is Padraig Browne, the third generation of his family to engage in dairying on the family farm at Rosemount.

“I’ve been trying to go more on the sustainable model," says Padraig.

"This year, I sowed forty acres of red clover, which is basically grass for silage. You need to spread almost no fertiliser on it at all, which is a good saving.

"I also run a lower stocking rate, I’m below the derogation limits.

“I’m focusing on running the farm efficiently with low labour units, low inputs.

"Compared to other dairy farmers in my group, I think I’m probably making as much money as most of them, with the exception of the guys who have, you know, three hundred, four hundred cows.”

Food production, farming and climate change are under the spotlight in the project that began in The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art at Trinity College Dublin before embarking on a tour around key parts of rural Ireland.

The culmination of three years of research which included sculptural plantings, workshops and performative feasts held in the City Assembly House in Dublin and the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny under the banner ‘Sustainment Experiments’, the project runs at The Douglas Hyde until June 23 and encompassed a Walls & Halls Tour of rural Ireland to May 4.

Voices are central to creating engagement, artist Deirdre O’Mahony, explained: “The starting point has been multiple conversations between farmers, scientists and politicians at organised feasts that generated open and frank conversations about food production and current challenges.

“These were transcribed for a libretto, developed with writer, Joanna Walsh, along with some of Ireland’s most exciting singers and musicians, among them Siobhán Kavanagh and Ultan O’Brien, each with a distinctive pitch, style, pace and vocabulary.

“The sound we’ve created will communicate entangled human and non-human activities; sowing and harvesting, extreme weather and the hum of solar and wind farms, along with concerns about the reality of farming life; the volatile demands of the market, food regulation and policies.

“Within the soundscape, other voices are also being heard; breathing animals, insect and soil creatures, the assembled, complex mix of voices, accents and sounds, collective roots that unsettle ideological positions of purity and righteousness.

“The Quickening represents a polyvocal response to the most urgent questions affecting land and its inhabitants, giving voice to the invisible protagonists that shape our earth's future and an idea of being-in-common that encompasses all earthly inhabitants,” Deirdre concluded.

The Quickening will tour to six rural locations in the east and south east, among them barns, farms halls and community centres. The Walls & Halls Tour runs from April 18 to May 4 and visits Rathanna Community Hall, Carlow; Coolydoody Farm, Waterford; The Powerhouse, Callan, Kilkenny; STAC Chapel, Davis Road, Clonmel, Tipperary; Foresters Hall, Aughrim, Wicklow; Blackbird Cultur-Lab, Foulksmills, Wexford.