Tag Archives: Hemp4Soil

THE community of Loop Head in West Clare scooped a national award in the 2022 IPB Pride of Place Awards announced at a ceremony held at the Clayton Hotel in Dublin last weekend. Scariff Community Council, Mountshannon Community Council, the Shannon in Bloom project and the Loop Head Together Project were nominated by the Rural Development Directorate of Clare County Council to participate in the annual competition. The Loop Head Together Project was the overall winner of the “Coastal Community” category. The project seeks to facilitate the communities of Loop Head Peninsula to come together in a spirit of resilience and integration to create a place ‘where everyone can thrive’. It includes nature monitoring and nature tourism development. Loop Head also was named winner of the Climate Action Special Award for a regenerative farming experiment named Hemp4Soil, which explores the potential to improve soil quality and biodiversity while also creating alternative sustainable income streams for farms on Loop Head. The …

A PROJECT to explore the improvement that growing hemp could have on soil quality has been launched in West Clare. Community-based local development and farming forum Loop Head Together launched its Hemp4Soil project with the aim to vastly improve overall soil quality and benefit local biodiversity. Based on the west Clare peninsula the group has organised the experimental project in conjunction with Hemp Co-Operative Ireland and Teagasc, the first of its kind in Europe. The results could potentially help create sustainable income streams for the farmers involved, as well as providing a product from which offshoots could inspire local industry. Margaret Cotter, speaking on behalf of Clare County Council’s Rural and Community Department, said, “This is a wonderful demonstration of how a small rural community can lead the way in research and real-life practice for climate initiatives and potential carbon sequestration.” Hemp4Soil intends to use regenerative farming techniques to improve the life of soil via soil remediation, microbial life and …