A murder of crows, traditional enemy of crop growers, circles overhead as Con Traas leads a tour of his apple farm near Cahir in Co Tipperary.
The birds are a constant presence and too smart to be deterred for long by any of the usual defences, such as scarecrows or bangers.
But the general human bustle, of which there is plenty on a farm that doubles in summer as a campsite and also has a shop selling produce direct to the public, keeps them somewhat at bay.
Traas is meanwhile dealing with new and more insidious threats. On a half-hectare stretch of orchard, he recently constructed a series of anti-hail fences, with concrete poles, steel wires, and plastic netting, at a cost of €44,000.
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This will become the norm as his orchards are gradually replanted, protecting them against the newly-violent summer hailstorms of the kind that, with snowball sized hail, caused havoc in Italy last year.
Climate change is an air-and-ground assault. Traas has strawberry fields too and when he mentions he can no longer grow those fruits “in the ground”, this is at first puzzling, since the ground is where they still seem to be.
But he means the soil, of course. Strawberries are liable to infection with phytophthora fungi – distant relations of the thing that caused potato blight. To kill off the spores, the earth used for the crop has to be rested periodically for 10 years.
On a 60-acre farm, he has “run out of” strawberry rotation space. Using peat as a substrate is a no-no these days, however. So instead, he must resort to coconut coir – a natural fibre extracted from the husk of coconut – imported from Indonesia.
This too involves ethical issues, including the carbon costs of transport, although those are small compared with the damage of peat processing. Also, while Indonesia benefits from selling coir to rich countries, it means the Indonesians “don’t have enough of it themselves,” Traas says. “New solutions bring new problems.”
The Traas family were among Ireland’s first Greens. Con’s parents Willem and Ali moved here from the Netherlands in the 1960s, part of a postwar migration of Dutch farmers in search of less crowded countries with more land.
They brought a century of accumulated horticultural expertise to this corner of south Tipperary, choosing it partly because it already had a small orchard. They knew apples would thrive on it.
This is the south of the country,, but Traas offers a reminder: Armagh in the north was Ireland’s traditional Orchard County: “Apple trees are not that fussy where they grow.”
The main thing is “they don’t like to get their feet wet”. Heavy winter rains stress the roots, impairing growth. Luckily Ireland is not as wet as we imagine, so far anyway.
“We get about 1,000mm of rain [annually] around here,” he says.
He traces his own awakening about the environment to the early 1980s.
“When Ronald Reagan visited Ireland in 1984, my father, brother and I went to Ballyporeen to protest. There were a lot of interesting people there. I signed up to Earthwatch then and later Greenpeace,” he says.
The big environmental concern at the time was “the hole in the ozone layer”. But when he went to UCD to study agriscience in 1986, he also began educating himself about the environment and learning the science behind things like the changing seasonal patterns he was already noticing back home.
Willem Traas, who died about 10 years ago, was an unusual farmer. After moving to Ireland in adulthood, he sat the Leaving Cert English exam (“and got a C”).
He wrote poetry, was published in the Sunday Tribune once and helped found the Clonmel Literary Society, where writers share and critique each other’s work.
But he loved farming – partly, Con thinks, because it’s a good vocation for the creative. Although Traas jnr doesn’t write himself, he has plenty to occupy him.
“The Apple Farm”, as the place is officially known, includes a shop selling not just fruit but home-made juice, cider and other locally produced foods, such as O’Donnell’s crisps.
The summertime campsite has 30 pitches (closing for the season this weekend). Casual visitors, Con has noticed, include groups of Indians and Bangladeshis who come out from the nearby towns to spend time and take selfies among the apple trees.
“I think it’s a cultural thing for them,” he says.
There are 20 people working year round on the farm, supplemented by another five during the summer. Unlike fruit farms in post-Brexit Britain, there has been no shortage of workers so far.
“This is my pest-control unit,” he jokes at one point, picking a ripe red apple off a tree and showing me the earwigs bustling around the stem.
“They eat all the aphid eggs. I have about five or six million of them working for me here.”
Among the particular challenges of climate change, meanwhile, a more general one looms, for which even Traas has no solution. Sooner or later, he warns, “there will come a time when cheap food is a thing of the past.”
He fears trouble then.
“There are enough right-wing nutters running around as it is,” he says.
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