The farmers and farmland involved with the BRIDE Project which stretches the length of the Bride Valley, will feature on Ear to the Ground on RTE 1 in two weeks time.
The programme was filmed a number of months ago when Ella McSweeney visited the farm of Donal Sheehan and spoke to the famers involved in the biodiversity project at a meeting in Corrin Marts Events Centre.
When Castlelyons dairy farmer Donal Sheehan, took over his father’s beehives, he was keen to increase his honey yield. But he noticed that on his productive dairy farm, he had very few flowers, insects and birds.
So he set about ‘improving’ his tidy farm by letting the hedges grow and blossom, by sowing nettle patches in ryegrass paddocks and planting wild flowers along the edges of his fields.
Then, along with a team of other biodiversity enthusiasts and experts, including ecologist Tony Nagle, Donal set up the BRIDE (Biodiversity Regeneration In A Dairy Environment) project with a view to getting neighbouring farmers to improve habitats on their often-intensive farms.
It’s a results-based scheme which measures species and tracks their increase over 5 years. Farmers along the Bride River valley have enthusiastically taken up the idea.
The programme will air on Thursday, November 29 on RTE 1 at 8.30pm.
