Leaving Cert Project ideas

Dickie10

Hi all, hopefully some can help here. I have been drafted in late to help a student to do Ag Science project, I was looking for a few brainstorming ideas. the working title is "The role of food production in maintaining natural resources in Ireland"

Finding it hard to get ideas on what to do, the student has zero background in Agriculture so its up to me to think of something she can do.

• Any help much appreciated. I started with thinking of Irelands natural resources: Air, Water, Soil, Hills /Mountains, bogs
• would wool be seen as a natural resource?

Any help would be great, the Maintaining part might be a saving grace to choosing a topic

K.G.

Anything "green related" would do really.i ve one doing it and in his class they are ones doing solar ,clover,AD,reseeding.its more a question of showing that you can do a project rather tying yourself to an endgame and a benefit if you know what I mean.try and think of what you can measure rather than what might be beneficial to the world.bales counting,kgs live weight,litres of milk or constituents ,litres of deisel used etc

Aravo

Organic farming or farming schemes such as Reps, Glas, Acres etc that have measures to designed to have positive outcomes on water quality to meet water framework directive and ground water framework directive.

Fencing off watercourses, reduced fertilizer use, slurry and fert spreading dates, fert register. Riperian buffer strips and zones. Protected urea use.

Siamsa Sessions

Carbon sequestration is another possibility.

Grazing animals in rotation, keeping the soil covered, min-till, multi-species, etc. Mostly normal (and old practises) on Irish farms that helped keep carbon in the soil ever before we knew there was carbon in the soil.

OrangeBadger

How about something on the Burren, how in the past they ordered all the farmers to remove their cattle from it to benefit all the unique flora that lives there........and then asked them to get the cattle back out quick when they realised the plants were only sieving because of the grazing the cattle do.

Belongamick

"The role of food production in maintaining natural resources in Ireland"

You could look at how government policy over the years has influenced the state of natural resources.

For example, from joining the EEC, we were told to produce more - the market is there to take it. This did help farm families but more fertilizer, pesticides and non native livestock became the norm. Land draining created more 'productive' acres.

The peak of the 'gold rush' of sorts was the dairy expansion.

We now seem to have come full circle and are being encouraged to go organic, reduce fertilizer, eliminate pesticide and (as I was told at a recent ACRES course) reduce the frequency of drainage to reduce sediment getting into water courses.

I am not having a dig at any one government or other but it was the advise at the time.

For the student, a good helping of statistics is required to highlight any point made.