Sustainable food: Learn how to grow it yourself at Ballymaloe 

The school has always had the ethos of showing attendees where their food comes from and teaching students about composting, farming, and growing—even getting 12-week certificate course students to sow a seed in their first class.

With an emphasis on sustainable food production, many of the ingredients for the cookery school come from the productive farm and vegetable gardens, including a well-utilised one-acre glasshouse, all of which is open to the public to visit.

Hens roam happily through the orchards, supplying eggs to the kitchen. Free-range heritage breed pigs are raised on-site, along with beef and dairy cows, and the micro-dairy supplies creamy Jersey milk, cream, cheese, and yoghurt. 

Cookery students are encouraged to try all options and see what interests them.

“We wove as much as we could into the 12-week course, especially during evenings after class, but the course was already bursting at the seams,” says Allen. 

“We were very aware of our facilities — the farm, gardens and greenhouses — and of the knowledge, skills, and experience built up here. Every year, you learn more and more about gardening: The weather is different, and seeds behave in different ways. 

The people who have worked here for over 40 years have so much knowledge in their heads. This is lifelong learning and we need to pass it on.”

Since she co-founded the Ballymaloe Cookery School in 1993, Allen has been dedicated to teaching and inspiring people to feed themselves and others. 

Now, 11 years beyond the age when most people retire — but as engaged as ever — she has simply stepped sideways from the kitchen and straight into this long-planned, much-cherished project, which she is running with Karen O’Donohoe.

O’Donohoe is innovations lead at ChangeX, former head of community development at Grow It Yourself in Waterford, the instigator of the Cottage Market project and a familiar face to many as the co-presenter of the television series Grow Cook Eat. 

She defines the farm school as focusing on “everything to do with food before it arrives into a kitchen — be it someone’s home kitchen, a school kitchen, a Michelin-starred kitchen, a food truck kitchen — it all starts in the soil.”

“The main emphasis is on producing food,” adds Allen, “on growing, on rearing animals, on the skills that you need to have a measure of self-sufficiency, like how to make bread, how to joint a chicken, and fillet fish.”

While the farm school’s mission is broad and ambitious, specific courses — short and long — are offered to people who wish to learn a little or immerse themselves in the whole experience. 

The half-day and day classes — which include planting and caring for an orchard, natural home cleaning, and rearing poultry for the table — run alongside longer courses. 

A six-week sustainable food programme and a one-week practical homesteading are run in partnership with and part-funded by the National Organic Training Skillnet.

Homesteading may be a somewhat archaic word, one of which we might associate with The Little House on the Prairie, but the dictionary definition is “the act or practice of living frugally or self-sufficiently… especially by growing and preserving food”.

It’s an accurate depiction of what happens at Ballymaloe.

“There’s an epidemic of ill health, and a lot of people know what food they need but cannot access it,” says Allen. 

“They want to take back some control over their lives, to have some measure of self-sufficiency, but they don’t know how to do it. We’re sitting in the middle of this working, biodiverse farm where so much is already happening and we can show examples, tell them about mistakes we’ve made, and we have access to some amazing speakers and experts in their own fields.”

O’Donohoe, with her background in community and food activism, is excited about the farm school because it “offers people of different backgrounds, demographics, and locations the opportunity to take back autonomy and have a sense of choice. In the US, the freedom of choice around food is limited. Lots of people look at homesteading as a way of giving themselves and their family a quality of life and quality of food, as well as a sense of community around good food.”

She finds students “really react to the hands-on interactive immersive experience. 

There needs to be a degree of theory in our purpose-built farm school classroom to understand the why, but learning the how means we get out and about using the farms and gardens as outdoor classrooms.”

The farm school allows students to meet artisan food producers like Noreen Conroy from Woodside Farm.

Allen says: “They get to see the time, effort, commitment, passion, and purpose that really good sustainable organic regenerative producers put into their work — they’re the polar opposite of the mass-produced, ultra-processed foods that are killing people and the planet.”

O’Donohoe emphasises: “This is a solution-orientated course. Not only do [the students] have inspiration and knowledge when they leave, but we ask them ‘what are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do next week? How are we going to keep this learning and practice going?’ They know, at the very least, they can choose to support their own local growers and producers as they’re building up the skills to join them as an artisan producer.

“There’s always something that people can do, and we talk about it in a very realistic way: Focus on a short supply chain, shop locally, and go to that farmers’ market. Everyone can make a difference.”

Education and empowerment are key themes at the Ballymaloe Organic Farm School, but there’s also room for enjoyment.

“We’ve had a lot of fun building the curriculum and tremendous response from students,” says Allen. “All over the world, young people are starting to grow, and we’re doing our best to equip them.”

• www.ballymaloefarmschool.com