Cathal Mooney left his family's conventional sheep farm in Donegal to teach, work in Australia, and build a gluten-free bread export business. He returned to farming in 2018 with Heatherhill Farm, now running pastured poultry, sheep, pigs, and bees sold through local subscriptions and restaurants.
Questions this video answers
2018.
May 31, 2020.
June 11 (announced in the 2020 promo).
Chapters
Welcome to a new episode of Farm like youe Hero, folks. I'm Richard Perkins and today I'm here with Cattle Mooney from Heatherhill Farm. That's a farm located in Donegal in Ireland and it was established in 2018. Their farm is featuring pastured layers, pastured boilers. They have some sheep, some pigs, beehives. There's a whole diverse operation going on and I believe all of their produce is sold locally through subscriptions and drop off points as well as supplying to a few local restaura. And Catal took a farm scale permaculture design course with us over in Ireland and then also ongoing with the online training. And to me, I think you'll see through this interview, he's someone that's really taken what he's learned and run with it and is doing a great job. So excited to learn more about your farm. Katul, thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.
Thanks so much for having us. It's great to be here.
Yeah, wonderful, thanks. Maybe I wonder if we could start by just giving folks a little bit of your background, what you were doing before farming and like what things came about in your life that led you to this new venture.
Okay, so we're up on the northwest coast of Ireland. We're just on the Atlantic coast. So it's real rugged country we're from. And I grew up and it's mainly sheep farming, hull farming, and kind of lowland cattle farming. But I grew up on a conventional sheep farm, small scale. And in the early 90s into the millennium, a lot of farmers started working second jobs. And then all of a sudden there was no farmers working full time. But I grew up in agriculture and I loved farming. But as I started in my early teens, I started to see that it wasn't very economical. I couldn't see a way to make a living farm. And so I went to university, became a teacher. I was a woodworking technical drawing teacher. I just came out of college when the economic crash was so there was no work and I emigrated to Australia. And I was 21, backpacking around Australia. Actually got an awesome job. We used to work in events. We used to build temporary grandstands and corporate platforms for all the major sporting events. Basically trucked us around from city to city and done that for two years and got to see a lot of Australia. Actually worked in the cotton farm when I was over there doing a bit of cotton farming. And then an opportunity came up at home to get into food manufacturing. It was a local guy from my local Town was getting into. His family had a bakery and he'd done quite well at it. And he was getting into gluten free bread manufacturing. And I had worked in the bakery as kind of summer jobs and that when I was a kid and I thought that was an exciting project and it was close to home, so took it on and we went on a journey there and we started engineering bread that we actually ended up shipping all around the world. We used to ship it to America, Australia, all over Europe. And we just, we became one of the leaders in the gluten free market. And we were just experimenting really is how we got into it. And I'd done that for two or three years and it was through my time doing that that I was actually sitting down with the likes at Cargill and Dow, some of these big players in the world markets. They were really interested in us because we were doing some funky stuff with some of their products. And I was kind of really interested in where these products were coming from. And I started really getting into the nitty gritty of what's going into food and that. And then I started to kind of a realization came along that you know where our whole food system's at. And then I kind of started etching back at me again with this agriculture always in the back of my head. I'd have wrote off, couldn't make any money doing it. And so I started to look around to see is there anybody out there that was, you know, pushing. I was a lot older now and I've seen some innovative things around the world and started and mainly it was kind of stuff in the States I was seeing. I remember I was like people like Justin Rhodes. YouTube was just coming on to be a thing. I was kind of lucky to be at this kind of time, place and circumstance and kind of put me on to people like Joel Saladin. And I like I can even remember the day I started to find some of these people in America on YouTube and it kind of was like there's nobody over here doing it at all. And then I remember the day I stumbled upon your page and I was like crap, this guy's doing it all. Is it all figured out? Someone's been here, done this and that was kind of like really coming across what you said done at Ridge Deal. And that's probably like maybe four years ago or so. I was like, this all makes perfect sense in my head to listen in.
To unedited long form conversation. I'm super excited to announce the farm. Like a hero experience is Now Live. Our 2020 special features more than 70 interviews with Europe's best regenerative farmers in long form Conversation weekly Q and A sessions with myself, as well as the private Facebook community. Our Epic Hero membership is now only open until June 11th, so join now@farmlikeahero.com and we'll see you in there.
