24-Carat Problem

The carrot is not a newcomer to Irish ground. Old Irish literature records meacon — the tap-rooted plants, carrot and parsnip together — as a staple of the lubgort, the kitchen garden attached to every Irish homestead worth the name from at least the early medieval period. The orange carrot as we know it was bred by Dutch growers in the eighteenth century and spread north because the crop suits northern European climates particularly well. It has been pulled from Irish soil, in one form or another, for somewhere between five hundred and a thousand years. The idea that Ireland is now structurally dependent on Spain and Israel to supply it is a policy failure so complete it requires a particular kind of determination to have achieved.

On the morning of the tenth of March, there were four thousand, four hundred and twenty-six euros in the account. That is what remained of Hughes Agriculture and Farming Limited when its founder, Julian Hughes, stood before the High Court and told a judge the business was done. Sixty-five acres of carrots in the Kilkenny clay. Ten acres of parsnips. Seventy-five acres of daffodil bulbs. A harvest worth close to two million euros, sitting in the ground, if anyone could get to it before it turned.

The provisional liquidator was appointed the same day. A fortnight later, the winding-up order followed. Hughes Agriculture and Farming Limited — twelve per cent of the sixty-six million euro Irish carrot market, forty-five jobs, seven hundred leased acres — was gone.

The company cited “historically inclement weather” in its filing. Weather was a factor. It was not the cause. The cause was a margin that had been thinning for thirty-six months before the rain arrived, and a company that kept going anyway.

Julian Hughes and his co-shareholder had been carrying the business on their own money for three years — €1.5 million in personal loans advanced against mounting losses. The Revenue debt of €689,000 is largely warehoused: deferred during covid, never fully unwound, it sat on the books gathering interest while the company tried to trade its way clear. The trade creditor bill — seed, fertiliser, packaging, machinery — reached €1.4 million. The 2025 growing season, Hughes told the court, was catastrophically poor. The projected loss for 2026 alone stood at €941,000 before the liquidator was called. Three years. One and a half million euros of their own money. Then the court.

John Dockrell has been growing carrots in County Wexford since 1990. He told the Journal this week that the price per kilogram today — around €1.29 — is essentially unchanged from twenty years ago, when it stood at €1.30 to €1.50. The price that would make the business viable, adjusted for inflation, is €1.90. It has not moved. Everything else has.

Growing carrots at commercial scale is not straightforward, which is part of why so few people do it. The soil must be light, sandy, stone-free, worked to a fine tilth at least a foot down. Heavy ground produces stunted, forked roots. The seed is tiny and must be sown directly — no transplanting, no second chances if germination fails. Then there is the carrot root fly, a pest essentially impossible to eliminate, whose larvae tunnel through the roots and ruin the crop; the only reliable defence is physical mesh kept over the crop continuously, removed only briefly to harvest. Even thinning the seedlings must be done in one quick pass, because the smell of disturbed carrot foliage draws the fly immediately. Dockrell’s ground in Wexford — sandy, well-drained, precisely the right soil — is not where he grows carrots by coincidence. It is where he grows them because it is one of the few places in Ireland where it works at scale. He covers early crops with poly fleece, winter crops with straw, supplies the major multiples for forty weeks of the year, employs thirty-one full-time staff and thirty-six seasonal workers, and has won Bord Bia’s Origin Green award. He has been doing this for thirty-five years.

The knowledge, the ground, and the infrastructure are not interchangeable. You cannot redirect a Kilkenny beef farmer toward carrots when one of the specialists goes under.

Ireland’s agri-food sector exported €18.28 billion worth of goods in 2023. Ninety per cent of Irish beef, sheepmeat, and dairy goes abroad every year. In 2024, dairy accounted for €6.5 billion of exports, beef for €3.1 billion. The country is an exceptional agricultural exporter. It has, in the process, largely stopped growing food for itself.

The land is productive. The rainfall is ample. The conditions for root vegetables are, as Wexford’s sandy soil and three-and-a-half decades of Dockrell’s carrots demonstrate, genuinely good. The specialisation toward beef and dairy is not an accident of geography. It is the predictable outcome of fifty years of subsidy architecture. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy pays by the hectare, and productive land — for subsidy purposes — is land under grass and livestock. In 2020, public money made up a hundred and fifty-seven per cent of income on Irish cattle rearing farms, and a hundred and three per cent on sheep farms. A carrot grower leasing seven hundred acres in Kilkenny and a beef farmer on the same ground occupy different economic universes — not because the crops are different in any intrinsic way, but because one of them was written into the policy and the other was not.

The result is a vegetable sector competing on open market terms, with no floor price and no income support, against imports from countries facing none of those conditions. Teagasc puts carrot imports at thirty-seven per cent of domestic consumption. The main suppliers are Spain, Israel, and the Netherlands. Spain’s carrot country is Almeria — the driest region in Europe, where irrigation is intensive and water is scarce. Irish carrots grow in Atlantic rainfall and require none. Carrots are among the more nutritionally serious vegetables: the beta-carotene that gives them their colour converts in the body to vitamin A, supporting vision, immune function, and skin. They carry fibre, potassium, and vitamin K, and are low in calories relative to what they deliver — a vegetable that earns its place on the plate rather than decorates it. A UK peer-reviewed study found that domestically grown root vegetables carry a nine-fold lower climate impact than imported equivalents across the full supply chain. The nutritional and environmental case for local, rain-grown Irish carrots over intensively irrigated Spanish imports is almost certainly strong. Teagasc has identified the need for comparable Irish-specific data on carrot carbon and water footprints, noting that it could allow growers to make a formal sustainability case to retailers. That data does not yet exist, because nobody has paid for it. The growers competing against Almeria on price are almost certainly also beating it on carbon — and have nothing to prove it.

Ireland’s vegetable import bill reached €412 million in 2023, up seventeen per cent on the previous year. GIY’s Michael Kelly put it plainly this week: Ireland exports roughly ninety per cent of the food it produces and imports around eighty-three per cent of its fruit and vegetables. The CAP crisis reserve has released emergency payments to Irish horticulture — €9.5 million in 2023, a €32.5 million scheme in 2024. Patches. The framework underneath them, which made it rational for Irish landowners to run cattle for half a century rather than grow vegetables, has not changed.

The carrot season ends around the first of May. In the weeks before Easter — the roast lamb, the glazed parsnip, the traditional plate assembled once a year — carrot sales increase six to eight fold, then drop sharply after Easter Sunday. Hughes cited the window explicitly in his court filing: the difference between harvesting before Easter and missing it is, by his own estimate, the difference between €1.76 million and €500,000 for the same sixty-five acres. The liquidator has until the end of April. After that, the asset becomes a liability.

If you are John Dockrell, watching Hughes go under from your ground in Wexford — the mesh barriers, the straw, the forty weeks, the thirty-five years — you do not need a policy document to tell you what the arithmetic means. You have done it already.

The myth that carrots improve night vision was deliberate British wartime propaganda, spread to conceal the introduction of radar from the Luftwaffe. RAF pilots were credited with their accuracy in the dark to their carrot-heavy diet. The story has never entirely left. It is not entirely false — vitamin A deficiency does impair vision. But the claim that eating carrots beyond a normal diet sharpens sight was, as the RAF knew, a convenience. The carrot that supposedly won the Battle of Britain is now grown in Almeria and shipped to Dublin at eighty-nine cents a kilogram.