Kate Caoimhe Arthur is the LUNZ Hub Creative Collaborative Placement artist in Northern Ireland, where she is enquiring into Land, Livestock and Livelihoods. She’s meeting researchers at the Agrifood and Biosciences Institute, and livestock farmers across Northern Ireland as well as researchers at the Agrifood and Biosciences Institute. In this blog, she shares reflections on her meeting with Professor John Gilliland.
A first meeting
It was a great pleasure to meet Professor John Gilliland in December, and hear about his years of experience in farming, policy and innovation.
The Gilliland family have been farming at the 120-acre Brook Hall in Derry-Londonderry since 1856. Although John has handed over the day-to-day management of the farm to his son, David, he continues to pioneer sustainability innovations he’s made over thirty years, and champion them across the world in educational and outreach settings.
We met not at Brook Hall, but on the north east coast of Ireland, looking out onto the distant view of the Isle of Man, the Scottish coast and a just-visible Cumbria. The clearness of sea and sky gave us the right conditions to take a long view of the life of Brook Hall, stretching back through the generations of Prof. Gilliland’s family, and to look in some detail about the different innovations trialled at Brook Hall, and the career it had inspired in farming, in policy and international education.
REvelations of LIDAR
I was inspired to hear about the present experiments with LIDAR and the opportunities it is offering to farmers throughout Northern Ireland. This remote sensing technology uses pulsed lasers (from an aircraft or drones) to ‘read’ a landscape and produce 3D digital models of the land’s surface. Through LIDAR, farmers have the singular experience of viewing their entire landscape in 3D, enabling views which indicate the historical topography and composition.
The topographical layers can be stripped back, allowing us to see the entire view as if we can lift a layer away. It can be rotated and examined like a cake you could slice through. The potential for landowners is huge, for example, being able to identify drainage routes and run-off points for floodwaters. John tells me that this technology has allowed 93% of Northern Irelands’ farms to be surveyed through DAERA’s Soil Nutrient Health Scheme: a world first for delivery and uptake.
Traditional, ancient and pathways of change
Another fascinating topic we discuss is the move at Brook Hall towards combining tree planting with cattle, and the consequent health of the soil. This moves away from a ‘traditional’ separation between parkland and grazing land, and towards a more ancient form of land use.
The meeting was my first in a series of meetings across Northern Ireland as part of my Creative Collaborative Placement with the LUNZ Hub. It was fertile ground for my first steps into thinking about the opportunities for poetry.
… poets and farmers have the same core skills at the heart of our activities – long and careful observation.
John and I reflected that poets and farmers have the same core skills at the heart of our activities – long and careful observation. It left me wondering if I could write with the intensity and precision of LIDAR, and what a poem would find by stripping back the layers one by one and rotating a farm.
I am so grateful to John for his time and company. I look forward to seeing what farmers in other counties have to say, and I hope I can meet with someone in all six!
More information:
John Gilliland is a special advisor to the UK’s Agriculture Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and to Quality Meat Scotland (QMS), and chair of the UK’s Sustainable Farm Networks. He is also the Professor of Practice in Agriculture and Sustainability at Queens University Belfast; and chair of the innovative, EIP-Agri funded, farmer led, carbon farming project, ARC Zero. His family farm has independently been verified to be ‘Beyond’ Net Zero. John chaired the writing of the N. Ireland Sustainable Land Management Strategy which led to the creation of N. Ireland’s Soil Nutrient Health and LiDAR Scheme, which received an investment of £38m to baseline soil, trees and hedges across Northern Ireland’s farms.
DAERA is the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Northern Ireland)
Find out more about the context for Kate’s research here.
