Everyone, from Ray D'Arcy to Ian Paisley it seems, is eating porridge for breakfast these days.
Organic porridge oats are an increasingly popular and affordable breakfast choice these days for many households.
Along with Flavahans, Odlumns, Bunalun and Tescos all produce organic porridge for the Irish market.
Ulster says: eat your porridge!
And yet, within the overall organic sector, tillage is one of the poor relations. Only horticulture can claim to be as underdeveloped.
Less than 2% of Ireland's 45,000 hectares of organic farmland is devoted to tillage crops. Much of this is produced for use on the holding itself, or traded farmgate to farmgate.
The low levels of organic tillage production is unusual in many respects. There is undoubted and indeed rising demand.
There is strong feed demand from organic farmers as well as from the fish industry.
Organic tillage requirements in Ireland went up by 1000 tonnes last January, when the derogation allowing a portion of conventional feed in a certified organic ruminant's diet was scrapped.
Imports of organic feed and feed ingredients accounted for up to 7,700 tonnes, when last recorded.
And while this is significant, the UK is less than 40% self-sufficient in organic cereals. While the exchange rate between the Euro and the British pound will always affect the market, there is export potential for the sector in the future.
Another possible cause of conversions to organic tillage is the low costs involved, when compared to conventional. With lower costs and a higher price achieved, organic tillage's variable costs are less than 2/3 those of their conventional counterparts, according to Teagasc figures.
Taking all of this into account, while also adding other considerations, Teagasc came up with the rather optimistic total possible requirement of 18,000 more tonnes of organic cereals. This represented a six fold increase on the then situation in 2006-early 2007.
This was based on very ideal situations for organic tillage, and involved presumptions about dairy and the fish industry which were sunny to say the least.
Nevertheless, there has been some recent growth: In 2006 there were 72 registered organic farmers with a tillage enterprise farming 620 ha of tillage crops.
This represented an average of 8.6 ha of tillage area per farmer with approximately 2/3 of these farmers having less than 10 ha of crops.
By the end of 2007, there were 93 registered organic farmers with a tillage enterprise, farming 1283 hectares, which does represent a significant increase (2008 figures are as yet unavailable).
This growth has been helped along by policy initiatives aimed at further increasing the amount of organic tillage in Ireland.
Conventional farmers can now convert part of their holding to organic. Decoupling organic from REPS was done in part with tillage farmers in mind, while additional organic payments (E240 per hectare) were made available in 2007 for stockless non REPS tillage farmers who grow green cover crops for fertility.
The most challenging part of converting from conventional to organic tillage is considered to be the rotations.
At last year's highly successful organic farm walks, and indeed at the organic farming conference in December, representatives of Teagasc highlighted their seven year stockless rotation. This ran from 2000 to 2007 in Oak Park, Carlow, and consisted of two years grass-clover, winter wheat, potatoes, winter oats, lupins and spring barley.
Crops achieved the following: Winter Wheat 5.9t/ha, potatoes 32.7 t/ha, winter oats 5.8 t/ha, lupins (which were considered unsatisfactory) 2.4 t/ha, spring barley 4.5 t/ha and triticale 7.5 t/ha. Triticale was grown in one of the plots designated for winter wheat.
Next week, we will talk to a Kinsale-based organic tillage farmer, to see how the practical reality stacks up against the theories.
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