Offaly farmer starring in RTE programme this week

An Offaly woman will be starring in an RTE programme on this Wednesday, June 14.

Eveline Gill runs a small tillage farm near Kilcormac. She's a farming consultant who advocates the latest developments in agricultural science and promotes all things organic.

In the programme she travels to Vietnam and, over a two week period, experiences what it's like working on a Vietnamese rice terrace, high in the mountains, where farming techniques have remained unchanged for centuries.

The RTE programme is called “Faraway Fields - The Hardest Harvest” and it will be broadcast, as part of a series, on RTE1 at 9.35pm on the 14th. The idea of the series is to follow an Irish farmer, forester and fisherman as they experience life in some very challenging conditions, as they discover what it's like living off the land and sea in three developing countries.

Eveline's destination in Vietnam is Nam Tang, a tribal village perched precariously in the northern highlands, and inhabited by the La Chi minority. Eveline points out that the plains of the Irish midlands, where she plants and grows her oats, offered little preparation for this way of life, in a village clinging to the side of a mountain, where landslides are a daily hazard. She discovers that increasing temperatures across South East Asia are making an already hostile environment even more difficult to work in.

She and her fellow farmers struggle in the searing heat and high humidity. She points out that the heat and humidity is getting higher as a result of climate change. Millions of rice workers across this part of the world toil in this difficult heat on a daily basis.

Eveline’s arrival coincides with a race against the clock to secure the rice harvest, before the unpredictable spring rains and an approaching hurricane devastate the crop. For the villagers of Nam Tang, this is an existential threat. Although the La Chi are a profoundly hospitable people, they cannot afford to carry passengers with the harvest in danger, and Eveline's physical ability to earn her keep and help get the harvest in on time is sorely tested.

For Eveline, the role of women in traditional Vietnamese society is an eye-opener. Much of the agricultural work is carried out by the women of the village, on top of the housework and child-rearing duties. But in the cities of the northern highlands, life can be even more hazardous for younger women seeking to escape those burdens; she meets with a young woman trafficked across the Chinese border by social media scammers.