Ballyfin farmer Brendan Guinan won an award at a national festival on biodiversity and sustainability.
The festival, hosted in the RDS in Ballsbridge, Dublin is called ‘Finding Common Ground.’
He took home the Rural Innovation award for his farm ‘Forbhia Farm’.
He grew up on a beef a tillage farm in geashill and where he learned the trade and claimed he was “destined to farm”.
Brendan began working the land inBallyfin in 2019 when he bought 26 acres of forestry with the view of turning it into a sustainable, regenerative farm without the use of harmful chemicals.
The awards acknowledge the work of individual, farm families and organisations who are enhancing the economic, environmental or social development of Irish agriculture and rural communities.
They produce free range pork, honey, bronze turkeys and rose veal with regenerative and chemical free practices.
As well as this the farm is also carbon positive as they move their animals routinely to fresh pastures.
Here, they distribute their own waste directly onto the land, fertilising the land without the need for chemical compounds which impressed the panel of judges at the competition.
The festival is an inaugural event consigned by the RDS foundation for social impact programmes.
During the event there are panel discussions exploring how Ireland can harness the benefits of their natural resources ethically and sustainably.
The organisation ‘RDS’ is to ‘inspire positive change’. The RDS Foundation delivers programmes on agriculture, the arts, enterprise, equestrianism, science and technology.
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