Explore every episode of the podcast CountryWide

The Agriculture faculty in UCD is 100 years old this year. Philip meets their newly appointed Dean of Faculty, Professor Karina Pierce to find out what her department is doing to meet the challenges of the next 100 years 

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With EU funding for farming with nature in retreat is this the moment that private finance might fill the gap. Ronan Doherty has transferred his fundraising skills from the renewable energy sector to nature conservation with the charity Hometree. He believes we are the cusp of a breakthrough in private sector funding for high nature value farming. 

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There are 52 EU funded LIFE projects currently running in Ireland with ambitious climate and environment goals. But the funding for these could be wrapped up over the course of the next two years as Europe shifts its political priorities. Mayo farmer and tourist guide, Colum Ginnelly, sees what good they have done and what their loss will mean. 

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The wormhole on Inis Mor is ever more popular with tourists thanks to viral cliff diving social media posts. But few are aware how dangerous it is to even walk around it. Lorna Siggins talked to everyone involved in a recent rescue that very nearly went badly wrong.  

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As our landscape changes, due to development, climate and new uses of land, the names of fields are being lost. Treasa Bhreathnach reports from Rahara, Co Roscommon on a project to record field names before they are lost forever. 

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Ireland’s record on climate action is on course to be the worst in Europe. Why have efforts to cut farming’s greenhouse gasses come to a standstill. 

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Poet Jane Clarke’s work is a firm favourite among farmers. Her new collection asks awkward questions of all of us about what we are allowing to happen to the natural world. 

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On Hawthorn Hill Farm in Roscommon Keith Brennan contemplates the unearthly call of the amorous fallow deer  

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How the seas and ocean around Ireland shape our lives and could change our future. 

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Prof John Bell flips Ireland's idea of itself on its head. The country is not a peripheral island on the edge of Europe. It is a large maritime nation that could become a bio-economic super power.  

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The Creative Ireland visual arts project "Dunmore Through a Lens" has captured the Waterford fishing village's people and their memories.

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Surfer and Academic Dr Easkey Britton believes that both we and the ocean will benefit by adjusting our relationship with the marine world.

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Gareth Murphy's company Oir Na Farraige has found a low impact way of harvesting seaweed for a range of uses that might actually protect marine ecosystems.

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Only the tiniest fraction of the flour needed to bake the 50kg of bread we eat a year is grown and milled in Ireland, and the cost of what we import is sky rocketing. We take a look at what needs to be done to keep the price of bread down by making it here.

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Following her victory in the EU's most prestigious organic award we visit Kay O'Sullivan at home on Glynn Organic Farm in North Cork. 

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Ireland's first certified Nest Protection Officer Training Programme was recently launched by Ministers Martin Heydon and Christopher O'Sullivan. It was developed by Owen Murphy and Donal Beagan of the publicly funded Breeding Waders EIP, with the training body Lantra, and supported by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture.  Donal Beagan spoke about how this new qualification sets a professional standard for the first time. 

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The survey was commissioned by Agriland and the ICMSA, and it shows it isn't only older farmers who want out. One in five farmers in their late forties and early fifties, which is young in this business, say they're likely to leave. Half of those planning to exit have no successor lined up. Yet the same survey says access to land is one of the biggest barriers for people trying to get into farming. So why aren't those leaving and those wanting in finding each other? 

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During the week, a major new survey was published which suggests there will be an exodus of farmers in the next few years. In a comprehensive survey of Irish farmers - with 2,300 people responding across every sector and county - one in three farmers say they will leave farming within the next five years. Della Kilroy reports.  

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Approx 5% of Irish children cycle to school every day. One idea trying to change that is the school cycle bus. It's a group of primary school children led by adult volunteers along a set route. Regan Hutchins joined the Skibbereen Cycle Bus in County Cork, to show it's a fun way to start the day. 

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Paul Walker is well known in the business for breeding, training and trialling sheepdogs. Now the Chilean-English trainer has turned his hand to horses at the home he shares with his partner Leah Henry in Mayo. Lorna Siggins reports. 

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For a quarter of a century, John McKeon has been collecting seeds from the trees and hedgerows around his home near Castleblayney in Monaghan. The 75-year-old retired agricultural adviser has used them to grow more than twenty species of native tree, among them oak, holly, hazel and more. John's work is at the heart of 'Seeds of Inspiration', a project from the Irish Wildlife Trust and the Monaghan Biodiversity Office.

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If any of you have an apple tree in a park near you, on your farm or garden, you’ll notice how early the apples have appeared - very early. Con Traas's parents, Willem and Ali, came from Holland in 1967 looking for land to grow fruit. They found a farm with an old orchard in Tipperary, and the family has been growing apples there ever since. 

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This week, five secondary schools, from Donegal to Cork, were presented with an Aberdeen Angus calf to bring home and rear. It's all part of the Certified Irish Angus schools' competition, which asks students to do a research project on farming. 180 schools entered this year, and the finalists collected their calves at the Ploughing. 

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The All-Ireland Lamb Shearing Championships took place at the Ploughing this week when Ireland’s fastest and most skilled sheep shearers - ranging from juniors upwards - were put to the test.   

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At the National Ploughing Championships, young agri start-ups had a chance to pitch for Enterprise Ireland awards, and Suzanne Campbell met three of these companies as they tried to catch the judges' attention, each trying to win one of the overall prizes.

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Ireland sends its plan for restoring nature to Brussels, so how much public money will be allocated to it, and what will it ask? Minister for Nature, Heritage and Biodiversity Christopher O’Sullivan joined us to discuss. 

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A lot of this vision of a more "open access" Ireland might seem unachievable. But there is an example of farmers opening up access to the public and everybody getting along. The Sheepshead Way was created 30 years ago this year – securing agreement from 265 different landowners to open up all the old mass paths, holy well paths, to school through the fields paths and connect them all together into a six day hike.

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This morning we took a a closer look at the kind of access to the countryside that the state is actually investing in; Greenways. 350 km of Greenway has been built in the last 5 years, and there are plans to build out a network of paved cycling paths that will be ten times that long. But, along the South Kerry Greenway, compulsory Purchase of land from farmers who say they were open to granting access to cross their farms without being forced to sell has generated conflict. Cleona O'Shea, chairperson of the National Greenway Action Association discusses. 

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Tim Hannigan is a Cornish born Travel Writer so as somebody who grew up with a right to roam the countryside, the thing about living in Ireland that he can’t get his head around is the comparatively limited access to the countryside that we settle for here. So he set himself the challenge of walking through Ireland’s heartlands - from one side of the island to the other - without trespassing to see how much of the journey could be completed off road.

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Ahead of President Trump's arrival to Ireland, RTÉ News Correspondents Brian O'Connell, Colman O'Sullivan and Elizabeth Hearst brought us the latest updates live from this morning. 

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Amanda Galvin is running an organic sheep and tillage enterprise not too far from Tullamore. She hasn’t dipped in to any of her winter fodder, her fields are notably greener than her neighbours and her ewes actually need to lose a bit of the weight they’ve put on over the summer before she puts them to the ram. 

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The creamery Tirlan surveyed 800 of its farmers last week – and over 80% of them said that they had already fed several week’s worth of what they should be feeding in December and January. And 90% said that there was barely any grass in their animal’s diet now. Head of Dairy Knowledge at the farming research agency Teagasc, Joe Patton joined the programme to share findings of a survey that gauged how deep the shortage of winter fodder is going to run this year. 

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This week, Countrywide reporter Della Kilroy visited Hickeys farm to meet father and son Martin and Gerard Hickey and find out how this summer’s weather has affected their crops, and what it means for the future of Irish vegetable growing.

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The number of farmers that have found themselves without water, or running low, or sitting on a sluggish well means that Harry and John Ellis – father and son team from Hacketstown Co Carlow are out the door with enquiries for drilling new wells. Dr Claire Bergin from the ICARUS Climate Centre in Maynooth University explained how the future of farming relies on how well farmers adapt to extremes of drought and floods. 

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Six of the country's biggest retailers - Aldi, Dunnes, Lidl, Marks and Spencer, SuperValu and Centra, and Tesco - have signed up to the principles of a new Horticulture Grower-Retail Charter. It arrives at a hard moment. Irish horticulture was worth €652 million at the farm gate last year. But the growers are disappearing. So how is the charter landing with the people who actually grow the food?

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Grangecon is in the west of Wicklow, under the hills. Hannah Page Fox lives on a sheep and Christmas tree farm in Grangecon. A year ago, with nothing much to warn her, Hannah was told she had lobular breast cancer, and that it had already spread. The year since for Hannah has been medical. Ella met with Hannah during the week to hear how the farm has helped her get through.  

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Kate O'Sullivan is the new owner of café Pónaire in Newport, County Tipperary - a café at the front, and behind it a roastery that roasts every bean the business sells. Prices in Brazil for beans peaked early last year at nearly four and a half dollars a pound. It's eased since. But the warehouses are emptier than they've been in years, nobody in the trade will tell you where it goes next, and the cup you buy on the way to work has not got any cheaper. 

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On 26th of July, 75 years of waiting ended in Croke Park, and Sam Maguire is in Mayo at last. Stephen Coen has been chasing that day since he was seventeen, but he was named to start last month's final, and before throw-in, injury took him out of the squad on the day, but no one was more central to Mayo’s successful run than Coen. When he's not playing, Stephen farms cattle and sheep with his father Liam and his brother David outside the village of Hollymount.

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Under the EU Nature restoration plan, Ireland must draw up an inventory of artificial barriers on its rivers and decide which of them will come out to restore at least 25,000 kilometers of free flowing rivers by 2030. One of these barriers is Annacotty weir in Limerick on the river Mulkear. Head of Inland Fisheries Ireland Hazel King joined us to tell us more. And some locals told Ella McSweeney their concerns.

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Journalist Hannah Quinn Mulligan met with potato farmer Donald Tracy in Kildare whose harvest has been reduced to half due to the hot and dry weather this year.

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Black water valley has a new resident, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Ella McSweeney spoke with a cheesemaker who lives a stone's throw away from his new residence.

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The city's food festival, Cork on a Fork, has two more days to run. Some of the best of it isn't happening in restaurants at all. Up on the northside, in Knocknaheeny and Hollyhill, there's a community garden that neighbours have built between them, run by the NICHE Community Health Project.

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It’s unfortunately become part of the summer in Ireland - reports of algal blooms on our lakes, some toxic, with county councils across the country warning us to not bathe in the water and keep dogs away. Frances Lucy is a freshwater scientist at ATU who’s spent her career studying Irish freshwater. 

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Every rural parish had homes where the latch was never down. They were called rambling houses, and they were a deeply held tradition in rural Ireland, helping bond communities. It’s a tradition that’s being celebrated by Birr Men Together working with artist Hazel Greene to collect the stories and songs that made those nights what they were.  

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We’ll begin on the hills and it’s about commonage - land own between farmers. Roughly 400,000 hectares of farmland is held under commonage, and it can become some of the richest habitat in the country. Managing it well means getting all the shareholders to agree, which can be easier said than done. So what’s the future for our uplands?  

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