Imagine yourself at a mart. You have your grand weanlings or butchers’ heifers at a special sale. The prices don’t fetch even the conventional level and you’re wondering why you are producing organic animals at all. Is it worth the hassle, you are asking yourself. Why pay so much more for feed etc and fees to an organic inspection and certifying body?

You may be thinking of dropping out of the "movement" altogether. The future looks bleak.

Unfortunately this is not too fantastical a scenario and many organic beef and lamb producers are probably in this situation this year.

So, if things are that bad, why is at least one organic beef farmer laughing all the way to the bank?

Michael Hickey, pioneer organic farmer (not entirely unknown in IOFGA and on these pages) spoke at Fèile na bPrataì, last September at the Organic College, Dromcollogher. His message is to market your meat directly to your customers – it is easy to do today, he said, what with blast freezing, cheap deep freeze cabinets and so on. Your prices need not be any dearer, he told us, than that of the retailers of conventional meat – your substantial premium is the middleman’s cut – and your organic certification is at least your initial quality guarantee to your customers.

Michael claims to be making a handsome living selling like this and declares "we’ve never had it so good".

This is where certification proves its worth - as a recognisable, accepted, quality assurance scheme.

Michael of course was an early innovator and has established loyal customer groups. But there is no reason why many more can’t do the same and at least start giggling on the way to the bank.

And I have a simple computer angle that could help in the most crucial area - marketing.

Many potential customers are going to be online and they like to check out their suppliers there.

You haven’t a computer you might say, or you have, but you don’t want to go online, and certainly can’t contemplate having your own website. But you need a brochure, something that tells your customers who you are, what you do and how you do it and why they should buy from you.

This is where the web comes into its own. You could have a full colour brochure online, as a page within an existing website. You would have your own unique address and all for a fraction of what it would cost to print or have your own website built
For example, if you sent me the text of what you want to say and a few photographs of yourself and the farm, I could have you on "live"over a weekend and keep you there for a modest annual fee.

Then you get a card with your contact details and website address e.g. www.planorganic.com/Murphy Organic Beef, hand it out to all and sundry, not neglecting your own locality of course, and Riobàird is your uncle!

See also what other farmers are doing in this area; www.sheepdrove.com , www.welsh-organic-meat.co.uk , and for meat "deliveries by mouse"! -  www.eio.co.uk .

I will have a look at some of our farming institutional websites over the next few issues. Which reminds me: Dep. Ag. promised a big sophisticated organic website in the Organic Report last May. I spent a long phone call today trying to get the latest for y’all but there was nobody at home at Agriculture House except Min Joe’s secretary – and it was her first day on the job.

I took a peek instead at www.teagasc.ie .

I like its design – neat, uncumbersome and its logo is great. The top picture thumbnail photos are well chosen and hardly slow the loading of the site– I can do all that stuff now! Sorry, I should be looking at the content, the organic content, not the design – that’s Clonakilty and DW for you!

Bang on the front page is a graphic of Teagasc’s recent publication, Principles of Organic Farming, which I suspect you all have been waiting for with bated breath (I wonder how many copies they’ve sold so far?).
When I receive my review copy, I’ll tell you more.

Click on Environment on the Home page for organic research at Johnstown Castle. But if you want to contact the director, Dr J. Lee, for more info, as you are invited to do, don’t click on the auto email – it brings up a new email page with the wrong address. Not good, but when corrected, Dr Lee is prompt in sending you the latest on their research.

What is good is the detail about Colleges and Centres, again clicked from Home page. You’ll find all, for example, you need to know about Mellows, Galway, the 135 hectare National Centre for Advice and Training in Organic Farming. It lists all other agricultural and horticultural centres in Ireland private and otherwise, with the exception of An tIonad Glas www.organiccollege.com   ). Why?

Links on the Teagasc site are good too – I’m even mentioned there – last entry.

Altogether, from our perspective, very organic-friendly and accessible.

Organic Matters Nov/Dec - unpublished version - perhaps for obvious reasons.

Field of Dreamweavers

I used Microsoft Front Page software to create my website and use it currently to run it. It was recommended as being user-friendly, and the fact that it was relatively cheap, about IP 150.00 last year, was also not an insignificant factor. Like all MS products it is glitchy and has its ways, but mostly, I have got used to it and have until now resisted the computer disease of "upgrading" - the never-ending spiral of buying new hardware, software and acquiring "fixes"from the Web.
Several people I contacted for help (freebies) over the last year, when the web shite was getting thick, made me feel somewhat inadequate, even degenerate, because I was using Front Page. The inference was - when was I going to grow up and stop reading Noddy? A techie cousin, to whom I had appealed for help when FP was particularly acting the goat, gave me a flavour of the arrogance out there amongst professional designers for Billy Gates’ near-monopoly software. He said, "I’m not even going to talk to you until you’ve kicked the (MS) habit!" He’s a Unix and a Dreamweaver fan and he urged me to go down the Dreamweaver road – before I went mad.

Dreamweaver. What a lovely poetic name! I didn’t even know what Dreamweaver was at the time. For all I knew it could have been poetry-writing software. But it incrementally insinuated itself into my consciousness over the last year and when I began to contemplate using more graphics on my site (and consider a new web project) I had to have a closer look at the thing.

Which led me to Clonakilty. And a West Cork Enterprise Board (www.wceb.ie) course. Specifically, Macromedia Dreamweaver: Build Your Own Business Web Site, six days’ of training and practice – over six weeks - at Island Computers’ facility (www.islandcomputers.ie) in the new Technology Park in Clonakilty.

For a heavily subsidised € 250, you got the course, at-home "mentoring", Dreamweaver MX (the latest jazzy version + Fireworks and Flash, I think), free web site registration, one year’s hosting and lunches (the first one included local organic strawberries and Tipperary Organic Ice Cream!). I came for the skills but I stayed for the value!

If you haven’t such a course running in your area, or at least a MS FP one, then get your finger out and demand it. You wouldn’t like to be left behind West Cork now, would you?

Before we’re finished down here, every second person will not only have a website but ones sporting Java applets, virtual radio and interactive photo galleries.

But it’s not all fun and games, I tell you. The second week, I hadn’t done my homework and the boss, Kieran, threatened to send me home! He didn’t wear my excuse that I had been supporting my son’s rallying ( www.rallyinsite.com  ) in Wales the previous weekend (I feed the crews - there’s two cars running out of Cork - with organic food and drink – my conscience-salving contribution to the Irish rally-raids on the unfortunate British landscape).

To mollify teacher, I did do my sums the following week and brought him in a potato.

I find it hard going though, and the only practical result so far is the importing of the odd graphic into my site and creating a showcase for my brother’s mad horse-riding escapade  www.planorganic.com/steven.htm 

I will have a look at some of our farming institutional websites over the next few issues. Which reminds me: Dep. Ag. promised a big sophisticated organic website in the Organic Report last May. I spent a long phone call today trying to get the latest for y’all but there was nobody at home at Agriculture House except Min Joe’s secretary – and it was her first day on the job.

I took a peek instead at www.teagasc.ie.

I like its design – neat, uncumbersome and its logo is great. The top picture thumbnail photos are well chosen and hardly slow the loading of the site– I can do all that stuff now! Sorry, I should be looking at the content, the organic content, not the design – that’s Clonakilty and DW for you!

Bang on the front page is a graphic of Teagasc’s recent publication, Principles of Organic Farming, which I suspect you all have been waiting for with bated breath (I wonder how many copies they’ve sold so far?).
When I receive my review copy, I’ll tell you more.

Click on Environment on the Home page for organic research at Johnstown Castle. But if you want to contact the director, Dr J. Lee, for more info, as you are invited to do, don’t click on the auto email – it brings up a new email page with the wrong address. Not good, but when corrected, Dr Lee is prompt in sending you the latest on their research.

What is good is the detail about Colleges and Centres, again clicked from Home page. You’ll find all, for example, you need to know about Mellows, Galway, the 135 hectare National Centre for Advice and Training in Organic Farming. It lists all other agricultural and horticultural centres in Ireland private and otherwise, with the exception of An tIonad Glas (www.organiccollege.com). Why?

Links on the Teagasc site are good too – I’m even mentioned there – last entry.

Altogether, from our perspective, very organic-friendly and accessible. Three stars.