Cork crisp company 'blown away' as people turn up to hand pick 20 tonnes of beetroot

On Friday, staff issued an urgent appeal for help on Facebook, and farm owners Sandra and Joe Burns were "blown away" by people’s kindness and willingness to help.

“Over 60 people turned up, and they were from all over — Cork, the Limerick border, Tipperary, Kilkenny.

“We were thinking we’d be lucky if we got 10 or 20 people, but three times that amount turned up.

“People were still ringing up to [Monday] morning, we even had a school lined up to come help,” Sandra said.

Sandra and the team at Joe’s Farm Crisps estimated that the mission would take six hours to complete, but they were wrapped up with two to spare.

“People were so determined.

"There was a crazy amount of work done in such a short space of time. We got 20 tonnes of beetroot out in four hours,” she said.

According to Sandra, "everything was perfect, the weather was lovely, and what was happening below in the field was so feelgood".

“Everyone was so willing to work, and so glad to be out in the fresh air and doing something different.

“Some were recalling childhood memories, and for others, it was their first time on a farm. There was such a range.

“People were asking were we going to make an annual event of it,” she said, laughing.

As this is Sandra and Joe's busiest time of year, there was "a lot of panic". 

“It takes months for the beetroot to grow, and if what we had wasn’t saved, we wouldn’t have it until this time next year, which means our business probably would have been gone.

“But this now means that we have beetroot for the full year for our crisps,” she said.

Beetroot is in three of the five varieties of crisps that the company sells, Sandra said, which highlights its importance. 

The people who pitched in will be thanked by being sent some free crisps from the farm.

It was a second lucky escape for the family after they got their potatoes out of the ground just two days before Storm Babet caused severe flooding in Cork last month.

“If they were still in the ground, they’d be gone, they’d be rotten. We only got them out by the skin of our teeth,” Sandra said.

She feels for other farmers who still have acres of potatoes in the ground because they "know the stress behind the scenes" when you can't save a crop.

She said the recent rain has meant all farmers have had a bad year, something echoed by the Agriculture and Food Development Authority.

Teagasc head of crops knowledge transfer Michael Hennessey said “farmers are on the front line” when it comes to the extreme weather we have been experiencing lately.

He said the amount of records, and 30-year long-term averages that have been broken in weather stations across the country over the last year is “pretty frightening”.

“November was record wet, March was record wet, May was very dry, and there was a drought in June.

"July was record wet, August was record wet, September was something similar, October was something similar, and we’re not finished November yet, so it remains to be seen where we end up with that," he said.

According to Mr Hennessey, at this time of year, you would be hoping that all the potato crops in the country would be safely harvested.

However, he claims that the best farmers out there are probably only 70% completed, with 30% to go. Others are as low as 50%.

The hard part about that is that for every week that the potatoes are out there, you can expect the number of rotten potatoes to increase.

“At the moment they’re probably looking at at least 10% of a loss, heading towards 15% relatively quickly. And that is not going to get any better the longer they’re in there. They just disintegrate,” he said.

He claims that farmers who have fields that were submerged in water are just at a “dead loss”. 

"Those potatoes are gone, there’s no saving them. They drown essentially and they rot."