Food For Humans
Gourmet vegetables grown locally in Cork, using natural, chemical free methods. They produce exceptional vegetables and supply them to their customers through shops, farmer's markets, and wholesale. Their customers receive the freshest, healthiest and tastiest veg directly from their farm in Ballinhassig, Cork.
Food For Humans farm was born in 2014 from our passion for regenerative farming systems, it is split primarily into two parts, a french intensive market garden and a newly planted pick-your-own polyculture orchard. At Food For Humans farm they practice a blend of permaculture, biological farming and french intensive farming. This combination of approaches blends ,what they consider to be, the best from each of these systems into an abundant ecosystem which produces food of high nutrient density and exceptional flavour.
French intensive market gardening was developed by parisian market gardeners between 1850 and 1900, these masters of horticulture fed the whole of paris and exported food to england and they achieved all this on just 6% of the land in paris, this hugely impressive feat was made possible by their development of intensive growing practices and season extension they also used so much aged manure and compost in their gardens that they were said to build their own soil, multiple crops were grown in the same area one after the other with no break between and glass was used extensively to protect tender plants and stretch the growing system . This is a very simplified version of their practices but it gives an idea of the bounty these masters produced.
In its simplest terms a polyculture orchard is an orchard that has many different types of trees vines or bushes, a conventional orchard consisting of ,for example, apples is prone to pests and disease because once they get into your orchard they can move from tree to tree wreaking havoc, in our polyculture orchard we avoid placing trees of the same type next to each other and instead we have planted in rows but each row contains only fruit which is ripe within a 7 day period for ease of picking and the pests are confused by the apparently random planting pattern, what better way than to mimic nature. Food for humans farm is run by Stephen Sinnott and his wife Brigid, he trained and worked as a plumber in cork until 2012 when he became fascinated with sustainable agriculture.
His interests and objectives have evolved since then and Food for humans farm was born in 2014 from a desire to make a real difference in his local community by providing high quality food transparently and regeneratively. Food for humans farm is in its early stages of development and the future looks bright, 2016 was a very formative and educational year as the farm built infrastructure and developing production systems. The decision regarding organic certification was carefully considered and after research and discussions with experienced farmers we decided that the amount of paperwork and expense involved were not in keeping with our aim on the farm so we simply call ourselves chemical free.
Using chemicals to produce food has never been something we have considered and we leave it up to our customers to come to the farm and see how their food is produced, that is all the approval we need. We are what some would call a microfarm, our vegetable production site is only 3.5 acres and less than half of that is actively being used but it means we have room to grow with our customer base, the biologically intensive methods which we use allow us to produce an enormous quantity of vegetables on our small land base without resorting to high mechanization.
