About Me

The long and short of it…

I’m Conor. By day I work as a software engineer with Apple in Cork. It’s a great job with great people but when I’m not doing that there a few other things you could find me doing.

I’ve been running competitively for about 10 years now and I love what running has given me in life. Great health, happiness and friends. It also taught me the value of patience, commitment and simple hard work. This takes up a good chunk of my energy and time. I feel my days of competitive racing might be winding down but running will forever be a part of me and something I will enjoy into old age. Some of my race reports and results can be found on my personal blog.

Music is another part of my life that has fed my soul over the years. I’m self taught on the keyboard/piano and have honed my craft over the years allowing me to play almost any instrument using the keyboard and producing tracks using LogicPro on the Mac. I’ve been composing (primarily instrumental) music of various genres since I was a teenager and while this has taken a slight back seat in recent years, I still occasionally sit down and record a piece or simply just play. My backlog of tracks has finally come in useful as background music for my farming YouTube channel. You can find some of my music on my Soundcloud page.

Finally there’s the farming. There’s that. I’ve felt a pull towards the outdoors and nature for as long as I can remember but it was during a 6 month work secondment in California in 2019 when I fell down the rabbit hole on YouTube and was mesmerised by Charles Dowding and Richard Perkins and what they were achieving with the no-dig method on small-scale market gardens. I knew when I got back to Ireland that I wanted to do something in this space. Little did I know where it was heading.

At that time I was living in a small townhouse with almost no garden so I set up some small no-dig raised beds in the common area of the estate, involved the local kids where I grew some carrots, onions, garlic, broad-beans, potatoes and much more. I was hooked. I knew this is where I was at home. The feel of my hands in the soil, the insects humming around me, the patience and care required to nurture plants. I loved the whole process, I loved how nature constantly surprised me yet at the same time was so predictable. I loved how I was able to make a meal for myself from what was once a pinch of seeds. I also knew that I knew very little and this would be a lifetime of learning. Being humble is important. I also felt that this approach of not using nasty, artificial inputs and growing as naturally as possible would leave a positive impact on the earth along with providing me with my own food. In late 2020 I enrolled in a 2-year distance learning organic horticulture course which I completed recently. This gave me the perfect grounding, some on-farm work experience and reaffirmed my dream of building something great. This felt like my purpose and I had to follow it. But I needed land.

Fast forward to summer 2021 and I finally came across a property that fit. a 3.8 acre holding with a home in Midleton, Cork. There was almost 3 acres of pasture, a bare green canvas ready to be transformed into paradise. I moved here in early 2022 and got to work immediately. I now know I’m on the right path. I love being out there and I love having to try my hand at everything. Woodwork, plumbing, building, growing. My ultimate goal is to build and operate a healthy, biodiverse and beautiful organic farm, humming with life and producing bountiful harvests for the people of Cork. On the flip (boring) side of that is a commercial business, one which needs to be lean, smart and efficient. I’m working patiently towards this, slowly building, defining my workflows and making plenty of mistakes but always learning. One day soon I will invite the public onto the farm to enjoy the beauty, to lose themselves in nature and perhaps leave with a bunch of delicious, local and healthy homegrown organic produce. Can’t a boy dream?