7.2 Case Study: The Golden Vale and Dairy Production

The Golden Vale is a lowland region within the province of Munster with fertile pastures of green grass, spanning the counties Tipperary, Cork, Kerry, and Limerick (Cahill Irish Farm Cheese 2020). Due to the vast fertile land in the region, the area is well known for its dairy production, including farms and companies that sell dairies such as cheese, butter, and milk.

Given the vastness of the region of the Golden Vale, it is not only a region of beautiful landscapes and of farm production, but also of major domestic and international industry. While dairy farming has an extended history in the Golden Vale, the first creameries were established in the region during the late-nineteenth century (Breathnach 2000, 182). Today, the county of Cork holds more dairy animals than all counties of Northern Ireland combined, proving the exponential growth of the dairy industry within the Golden Vale in contrast to other parts of the island (Halleron 2018).

Farmers are integral to the maintenance of cattle in the Golden Vale as well as the production of dairy products. Many family farms are based in the Golden Vale, meaning that a large portion of Munster citizens are actively involved in dairy farming, including living on the land, engaging in farming, and being involved in programs relating to sustainability and viability of the land. Some farms are also involved in training and schooling for future generations of dairy farmers in southern Ireland.

How is Irish butter made?

Butter has been made in Ireland for centuries. The process of making butter has changed over time, with the evolution of different technologies.

Major technological changes in Ireland have shaped Ireland’s butter-making process, beginning with making butter in the home, to a now full-scale industry. The Butter Museum conducted an oral history with Madge Ahern, who recalls her experiences making butter at home. According to Ahern, butter making was a domestic job assigned to women of the house – deemed the “woman’s job”. Women would milk cows early in the morning, and then either send their milk to a creamery, or participate in the making of butter at home. For those who did not have enough milk from cows to send to the creamery, they used different tools of varying sophistication to stir the cream into butter (The Butter Museum n.d. “Audio Archives”). Some examples of technologies for homemade butter making include:

• a skimmer: a small hand-held device (or even using a plate) that collected cream that had risen to the top of a bowl of milk that sat for several days
• a tumble table-top churn, and/or a jug and tub; homemade butter-making slowed with the rise of accessible creameries nearby family farms
• a separator, a device that separates the milk from cream and divides the milk so that one side has skim milk and the other has butter fat (cream); it can then be mixed, sit to allow thickening, and then churned into butter

Beginning in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, new technologies emerged that influenced both domestic and industrial butter making processes. For example, the Alfa-Laval Mechanical Separator, developed by Swedish inventor Gustav de Laval in 1878, allowed for the speedy separation of cream from milk. Consider the below image Figure 7.4 of the Dairy Engineering Co. of Ireland’s Alpha Power Separator, from the early twentieth century. You can see options for industrial butter-making equipment on the left, but also for household/domestic sizing on the right. What does the large-scale sale of milk sterilizers and separators for industrial and domestic purposes reveal about changing approaches to milk and butter production in Ireland during this time?

By the early twentieth century, separators and sterilizers increased production of milk for sale and use. The diversity of equipment listed in The Dairy Engineering Company of Ireland’s catalogues reveal the boom in production of supplies that supported the butter making process in Ireland. By approximately 1920, facilities were set up with such technologies that facilitated larger scale production of butter. As we learned in Chapter 5, the distribution of items like these sterilizers and separators became possible through new trading pathways that emerged during this period, such as via the Grand and Royal canal trade routes, and also through emerging roads and train routes that allowed for larger-scale product distribution throughout the island. Considering the growing populations in urban centres like Dublin and Cork at this time, industrial separators made larger scale production for butter possible, too, and thus the sale of butter to domestic households in urban centres was similarly facilitated through these newly emerging trade routes.

The below item in 7.5 shows a domestic tool for butter making in rural Ireland. Considering the intersections of physical, human, and cultural geography, we can imagine how major shifts in technologies altered women’s use of space. Similar to the advances in electricity from the Ardnacrusha power station, we can surmise that domestic items like the separator below changed the daily life of women at home, making tasks like milk separation more efficient and thus allowing time for other uses of space in their environment. This change would have coincided with other technological shifts in the domestic sphere, such as electric irons powered by electricity afforded through the Ardnacrusha power station discussed in Chapter 5.

When you think about the development of butter production in Ireland, how has widespread global demand for the product changed Irish peoples’ interaction with the butter making process?

The widespread global demand for butter has changed Irish peoples’ interaction with the butter-making process, shifting from equipment sold to produce butter in the household to large scale industrial production for domestic sales and export.

Present-day dairy industry in Ireland

Today, the dairy industry of Ireland, especially those emerging out of the province of Munster, have an international reach and reputation. This is perhaps not surprising, as some of the key dairy brands in Ireland have a long history of international import. For example, Kerrygold, an Irish butter product, began exporting butter across the globe as early as 1964; it remains one of the top purchased butters in Germany and the number one butter import to the United States (Agriland 2016).

The Irish Food Board corroborates this trend, noting that “significant effort goes into developing new market opportunities for dairy exports” (Board Bia n.d.). Recent efforts have been made to integrate sustainable farming models into the Irish dairy industry, which can be viewed in farmers’ involvement in programs such as the ‘Sustainable Dairy Assurance Scheme’, that promotes a grass fed approach to dairy farming (an approach known for better animal welfare and perceived as more nutrient-rich and sustainable) (Board Bia n.d.). The temperate Irish climate is well-suited for the grass-fed approach, which affords farmers an extended period of time for growing grass, sometimes lasting nearly the full year (Teagasc 2017).

Kerrygold is one of the major Irish dairy companies that you may have encountered before through media or in your grocery store. It emerged in 1962 and has grown on an international scale over the past fifty years (Agriland 2016).

Part of what propelled Kerrygold onto the international stage was its well-received advertisements. One of the more iconic advertisements is the 1994 advert “Who’s taking the Horse to France?”, where humour and double-entendre are found in a scene where a woman from France comes to purchase a horse in Ireland, and develops interest in the horse owner based on his use of Kerrygold butter when making dinner for the family. Another well-known Kerrygold advertisement is the 2009 advert “The Sod’s Air”, filmed in Glenmacnass, County Wicklow, that explores the experiences of a newer Irish generation migrating abroad through the parallel of a child and wife leaving to Germany in parallel with Kerrygold being exported to Germany too. As you can see, even early Kerrygold butter advertisements produced for the Irish market focussed on themes of international engagement, with Kerrygold circulating in Germany and France.

Below is a Kerrygold advertisements produced for a German audience. When watching the German add below (Figure 7.7) and interact with the H5P video activity, look for cultural ideas about the Irish landscape communicated to international audiences via television media:

Figure 7.7 Irlands einzigartiges Wetter (Ireland’s Unique Weather), Kerrygold Deutschland TV Advertisement © KerrygoldDE, available on Youtube; included on the basis of the Standard YouTube License.

How does the Irish dairy industry contend with environmental sustainability?

In 2015, the European Union removed existing milk production quotas. This resulted in a significant increase in milk production in certain European countries including Ireland. Not only did Ireland increase its milk production, but it also increased its global butter exports (Gehrke 2022). To keep up with Ireland’s new post-quota dairy demand, Irish farmers had a far higher number of dairy cows than prior to 2015. Farmers also increased their grass production to feed these cows, thus facilitating higher quantities of milk and thus butter for export.

How does this relate to environmental concerns? To begin, in order to make butter one needs cows, and in order to feed cows, one needs grass. In Ireland, nitrogen fertilizer has been used at higher rates since 2015 to develop grass pastures for an increased cow population. Nitrogen fertilizer is known for polluting its surrounding ecosystems. In Ireland, there is a link between the increase of nitrates in dairy farming with increases in greenhouse gas emission, a trend that has consequences for the quality of the climate, air, ecosystems, and bodies of water in Ireland.

Beyond the initial step of feeding cows whose milk is used for making butter, there is also the climate impact of producing and distributing butter. Finnegan et al. (2017) conducted an analysis of the global warming potential (GWP) of each stage of butter processing and distribution in Ireland. Stages included transportation of raw milk to the processing facilities, the process of making the butter (including separation, storage, and pasteurisation of raw milk), and additional steps required to run dairy facilities, such as wastewater treatment, solid waste treatment, water consumption, chemical usage, and cleaning systems. After the butter is made, there is also GWP related to the packaging of butter, and its distribution (including transporting the butter domestically and internationally).

Finnegan et al. (2017) found that for the making of Irish butter, the processing of raw milk into butter was the biggest contributor to GWP. As well, Irish dairy producers are currently at the limit of the Irish Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) emissions to water levels. Additional wastewater treatment facilities are thus required in future for dairy production companies to run. The introduction of these treatment facilities will curb the emissions into Irish bodies of water. However, new water treatment facilities will add additional environmental stress due to its high use of energy. Given the growing nature of the dairy industry in Ireland post-2015, and with consideration of the GWP it brings, some scholars have suggested there be a carbon tax on dairy production (Finnegan et al. 2017, 167). As this section makes clear, the making of Irish butter at such a scale both relies on the sustainability of the Irish landscape, yet at the same time, it threatens the very livelihood of the Irish landscape.

The making of dairy products in the Irish context offers a unique example of the confluence of physical, human, and cultural geography from local, regional, national, and international vantage points. As a case study, it reveals insights into imaginings of the Irish landscape from domestic and international perspectives, understandings of how farmers produce from the land, how butter has shaped imaginaries of the Irish landscape globally, and also how the making of butter contributes to environmental crises in the region.