Farming in 2025: 'There has been no easy year since Covid'

Long before taking up the reins at St. Tola Farm, one of Ireland's leading and most highly respected goat farms and producers of St. Tola cheeses, Siobhán Ní Gháirbhith can recall stealing away to Sheridan's first specialty cheese shop in Galway to puruse the exotic and unusual cheeses.

Craving a career change from her work as a teacher, and hailing from a farming background in Co Clare, she says, "I just was thinking about it was a pity one of us six children weren't doing something with the farm ourselves as it became more apparent to us that having land was valuable and it was important that we looked after it".

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Ní Gháirbhith grew up in farming, with her grandfather's farm passed onto her father, but she says, "they were never real farmers" - a few cows for milking and donkeys kept more as pets.

But three miles away were her neighbours Meg and Derrick Gordon, the intrepid and ambitious entrepreneurs who decided to move from the East Coast of Ireland to Inagh, Co Clare, to change tack from horse breeding to producing farmhouse cheese.

That cheese, St. Tola, would eventually be bought by Ní Gháirbhith, who after years of working as a teacher and then with Shannon Development promoting local producers, had become even more appreciative of the farming background she was reared in.

Farmhouse cheese production had dwindled in the years since the two World Wars, Ní Gháirbhith says, and she herself was raised on processed cheese, like most Irish children of the time.

Speaking about taking over the farm, she says: "It just made sense that I'd be able to produce a very similar type of cheese, just the same cheese as them. Because if you were to try and produce that cheese, say, over in the east or even in the southwest or something, it would be different because what the animals eat very much is reflected in the milk, and that's been reflected in the cheese.

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"Small things make big differences."

In the years since, Ní Gháirbhith and her team of eight farm employees have weathered many storms - literally and figuratively. With climate change posing more and more hurdles for food producers, she has had to be resilient to keep her small company afloat.

"We're getting more and more rain", she says. "The seasons are less defined. And it's just like last year, we had literally nine months of rain, so it was very hard to get animals out on the land or get grass cut.

"The biggest threat to farming is actually with the climate change and the lack of inconsistency when it comes to the basic energy, whether it be water or electricity."

Being a sustainable and eco-conscious farm and food producer is clearly an ambition and point of pride for Ní Gháirbhith, but doing so poses more challenges initially than it solves, because "you have to invest heavily", she says.

There are government grants available, she adds, but "the thing about grants is you have to apply for the grants, which are often very, very bureaucratic and very time-consuming. Then you have to pay everything upfront, first of all, and you only get the grant afterwards when you claim it back. You have to be in a strong financial position to be able to make these investments".

"None of these investments are small. They're all big investments, but you're investing for the future."

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It's been a challenging time for farmers in general, she adds: "I think anybody in small businesses would say, and even from a farming, rural farming business, since COVID, there has been no easy year since Covid.

"It's exhausting because you never know what's around the corner. We're resilient. In the industry ... we've gone through the Celtic Tiger, the fall of the Celtic Tiger. We've survived Covid. But it is getting challenging, and I think government needs to be able to react quicker to what people need and in practical ways."

She's taken matters into her own hands, in a sense, by opening the farm up to visitors looking to learn about how the cheeses are made.

"My role to educate people", Ní Gháirbhith says. "I was educated by my parents about the importance of looking after the land and the quality of the land and the quality of the animals on it and the quality of water, especially as we're all dealing with the effects of climate change that's becoming more and more serious as we progress.

"Correct food, healthy nutritional food is not cheap to produce, so it can't be sold cheaply", she says, adding, "people have got used to paying cheap for food".

"Irish people, are so removed from the land now and from growing food compared to 50 years ago when the majority of people would have coming from a farming background, or would have had a vegetable patched out the back, or would have grown fruit or something."

Given the popularity of specialty and artisan foods in Ireland in recent years, it would be relatively easy for Ní Gháirbhith to scale her business up, but that isn't of interest to her. She's focused on quality over quantity, she says.

"I think from an environmental point of view, which is our biggest challenge now in the world, I think it's about having sustainable businesses that are sustainable in your own area, in your own country, and that is good for the environment."