Ella McSweeney's posts

Charles Smith set up 'Farmers to Market' - a collective of 12 commercial free-range chicken farmers in Monaghan and Cavan. But in

Kildare farmer Paul Brophy is a commercial broccoli grower. Here he shows Ella McSweeney how his broccoli is grown, harvested and packaged, and explains why the future of vegetable growing in Ireland is about scale.

19th century (anon) Irish poem that references fraughans, as read by Ed Hick

Report for BBC Farming Today with contributions from Teagasc head, Prof Gerry Boyle, and Roscommon farmer Brian Costello

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Presented by Ella McSweeney. By 2050 the population of the world is expected to grow to over 9 billion and proponents of "vertical farming" believe growing food in cities would use less land and resources than traditional outdoor methods, reduce transport costs and fossil-fuel emissions.

As vertical farms start to spring up in Sweden, Vancouver and the Netherlands, Ella McSweeney investigates whether they could provide a cost-effective solution that will increase yields or if it is just another example of head in the clouds utopian thinking.

Prod: Clare Walker.

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Bacteria aren’t always fussy about where to settle down and multiply; the gut of a human, a pig or a cow will do nicely. But they’re not the only thing we share with farm animals. When the bacteria turn nasty, we use many of the same antibiotics to treat our infections.

We know that antibiotic resistance is a problem. “One of the most serious public health challenges we face”, says the head of the European Centre for Disease Prevention & Control, Dr Marc Sprenger. Hardly a surprise, given that it kills 25,000 Europeans each year.

The European Commission wants to do something about this. They published a plan in 2011. Half of the actions address use of antibiotics on farms.

But it turns out that we know little about antibiotic use on Irish farms, because the Department of Agriculture does not collect the information.

Ella McSweeney has written on this issue for the Irish Times (below) and she joined RTE Radio 1's Pat Kenny to discuss...

Irish Times article - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2013/0225/1224330475957.html

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Ex-Department vet, Paddy Kirwan, says that Veterinary Ireland (the representative body for vets) called on Department of Agriculture to set up a centralised database of horses in Ireland back in 2010.

Ireland's Chief Veterinary Officer, Martin Blake, tells Damien O'Reilly on RTE's Countrywide that the Department of Agriculture does not know the number of horses in the country.

Tullamore beef farmer John Cleary expresses his shock and anger about the recent horseburger saga in Ireland