Walking around Martin O Leary's farm on the Beara Peninsula is a bit of an epic adventure.
High altitude terrain, patches of heather, broadleaf forest, a 20 acre lake and panoramic views from the heights, next to the house when his father Patrick and the young Martin lived.
(image (c) Oliver Moore: the view towards the Reeks from Martin O Leary's farm)
Thousands of years of history and heritage are visible here too. Myself, Martin and Rover the Sheepdog walked from one stone circle to another. One of the stone circles has a large burial boulder in its centre, and is next to the bronze age cooking location, the fulacht fiadh.
We walked and talked for some hours on a blisteringly hot day - I was delighted when we did encounter that 20 acre lake, as it is brimming with crystal clear drinking water.
From the old farmhouse, to the left, you can see the misty mountain tops of the Mcgillycuddys. In the foreground, Lough Gleninchaquin, and to the right, the rolling mountains that make up some of his 800 acre holding.
Martin O Leary is one of the class of 2010: the farmers who joined the Organic Farming Scheme this year. He has just begun his two year conversion-to-organic period.
One of the ironies of the organic certification system for farms like this is that the vast majority of the land here was always organic: no sprays or synthetic fertilizers were ever used on 778 of his 800 acres. One 12 acre field near the farmhouse was fertilized up to 10 or so years ago.
And yet the entirety of holdings like this, indeed holdings without even the one formerly fertilized field, have to wait two years for full organic certification.
All the while, after 400 years of industrialisation and intensive farming in countries like the Netherlands or Germany, farms there can fully convert to organic in the same timeframe.
Before starting his conversion period, he found that it just didn't make sense to keep doing what he was doing: �We were farming conventionally all our lives, we were getting no returns really. Selling lambs in the autumn for little financial reward. We knew it wasn't sustainable.�
For Martin O Leary, playing to the strengths of the holding made complete sense: �I wanted a unique product to better reflect the land and location.�
That said, the market for organic lamb is weak, with the majority going into the conventional sector.
To deal with this, he has decided to direct sell. �I'll try to sell about five lambs each week at farmers' markets�.
Various cuts, mince and in particular lamb burgers are the main products he will sell. �The animals are finished off grass completely, I don't feed any rations to the animals I'll be sending to the butchers� he tells me.
The lambs will be allowed to mature beyond one year, to about 15-18 months, to grow at a natural pace without rations. This has resulted in a very lean animal thus far.
�My butcher was very impressed with the first animals I brought to him, in terms of leanness�.
�I'll mostly focus on selling a really high quality lamb burger at the farmers' markets. I'm putting all the good cuts into the lamb burgers, so it has leg and shoulder in there, which is very unusual for a burger. Its also just minced once, and there are no binders, fillers, seasonings or additives.�
These burgers are about 85% meat and 15% fat, completely different to standard burgers, which can have equal ratios of both, and plenty else thrown in too.
He has quite a few options for direct selling, and has looked around Munster and indeed further afield to try to assess what will most suit him.
For more images of the farm, see here
For more on the incredible meat that he's producing, see here
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