‘It was the seaweed that stopped me emigrating... now it’s worth €120/t’

15ac of land on the shores of Clew Bay was not enough to provide a living so Padraig Gannon turned to aquaculture and now hand-cuts 10t of seaweed a week as well as farming oysters and periwinkles

Padraig Gannon stands outside a visitors’ centre on his family’s Mayo farm that used to be an old cowshed, as he speaks to a group of tourists about the three things that kept him from leaving Ireland forever: seaweed, oysters and periwinkles.

He built a business around the three. He sells around 10t of seaweed a week to a broker who takes it to Connemara where it is dried and pulped.

“The seaweed is more profitable than oysters, at least in the Irish market,” Padraig says. “When I was harvesting it in 1980, they went for about £5/t, now this stuff is worth €120/t.

“For a while there, no one cared about seaweed, now it has become important again. In the last year, we’ve realised it can be used for fertilisers and for the health industry. It has quadrupled in value.”

The Gannon family farm covers just around 15ac along Clew Bay, near Newport. Padraig was the fifth of nine children. As he was growing up, their 15 cattle and his father’s job at the local shoe factory weren’t enough to keep the family going, so many of his siblings moved away or migrated like so many young people in Ireland at the time.

“This was back in the ’70s and ’80s,” says Padraig. “The shoe factory where my father worked shut down after they started importing shoes into Ireland. Luckily, we had some sideline industries.

“We had our own seaweed factory in Newport just down the road, that’s what kept me at home. Unfortunately that closed as well a few years later.

“Back when I grew up, there were a couple of hundred boats along the bay dredging oysters on a daily basis. But they over-fished the area and it wasn’t producing enough.

“We’re working really hard to bring it back to how it was now but we have to be very careful — it can only be fished at certain times of the year.”

Padraig harvests the seaweed at low tide. It grows on the rocks along the bay, so he takes a boat and cuts it off with his sickle.

“It grows on the stone all over the bay, you cut it and leave a small bit and wait for it to grow again in three years. It’s a very renewable resource that way,” he says.

“Its food is in the water, so there’s no reason for fertilisers or seeds. It’s great for liquid fertilisers, and the demand is growing because it reduces emissions, especially for dairy stock.

“Clew Bay is sheltered — there’s great potential for people to grow it at the length of it. I tell people that it’s a mighty resources that’s right at our doorstep.

“And there’s no need to feed it, just cut it and it grows again on its own.

“There are a few different varieties of seaweed. The one I farm the most is Ascophyllum. You process green algae out of it and it’s got benefits for land, people and animals.”

Padraig remembers a time in 1983 when he did not feel as hopeful about the farm. Although he had stayed on and decided to milk the cows, he was very close to moving away.

“It had reached a point where we had nothing left to stay for, most people I knew were leaving,” he says.

“I remember reading somewhere that our best asset in Ireland is also our best export — the people. And that sentence touched me. I was still hopeful that something good would come our way since we lived on the doorstep of the bay.

“I was just after milking and closing up one day in July of that year when a Frenchman came here in a camper van and watched me as I was letting the cows out.

He kept saying this was a lovely spot, he asked why we didn’t have more cows. I said, can’t you see it’s a small farm? He then pointed to the small strips of our land along the bay and asked why I wasn’t farming there.”

This was when Padraig first came across ‘aquaculture’. Practised mostly on shores that are sheltered from the open sea and wind – it refers to farming aquatic organisms like shellfish or seaweed in the water itself, allowing coastal farmers who don’t have a lot of land to their name to use the sea as their base.

He travelled with the Frenchman to his hometown in Brittany where he saw that the Pacific Oyster was always in demand but just like in Clew Bay, they were over-farmed.

Padraig took a year out to learn about agriculture and machinery in Galway before getting in touch with the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to learn more about how he could use aquaculture on his own farm.

He enrolled in one of the first courses the state was offering to teach coastal farmers about aquaculture.

“After all this, I felt like we were sitting on a goldmine. So I started to farm oysters (rather than just harvesting them) and some clams in our farm this way.

“Now the French come to us asking if they can rent some ground in the west coast. They realised before we did that the west coast of Ireland has a lot of unrealised potential. And we are very careful about never over-farming again.”

Padraig sells 80pc of his oysters to France but it’s the seaweed that has really brought his farm back into life for the local market. He hopes that it will continue to grow.

“It was our seaweed factory that gave me the strength and the hope to stay here,” he says. “And now that it’s important to people again, it’s become the most valuable product I sell in Ireland.”

After setting up a visitors’ centre on the farm last year, Padraig has been welcoming people from around Ireland and the world, and introducing them to how they were able to survive over the years on their small strip of land along Clew Bay.

“I have a bad back these days. Ask any oyster farmer and they’ll tell you the same. You’re bent over on most days, there’s a lot of work that goes into it that really takes a toll on the body,” he says.

“So the tours have been a great way to keep an eye on the back but to also celebrate our farm.”