It’s a long way from Tipperary to Silicon Valley, but that doesn’t mean farmers can’t code. Overheard, always alert to the unexpected, was interested this week to learn of a home-made solution to a problem we didn’t know much about: cattle price transparency.
Brendan Kennedy (50) of Ballinahinch, near Cashel, around a full-time job off the farm and a part-time job rearing cattle, has created an app at irelandcattleprice.com that allows farmers to access the real-world going rates for their beef.
“I’m a farmer myself and I never knew all the details, everything was scattered,” he tells Overheard by phone. The app is about “gathering all the information a farmer needs in one place”, with quotes from the Irish Farmers’ Association and Bord Bia among others, alongside prices at factories and marts, figures from other jurisdictions, various averages and a range of data that probably makes more sense to farmers than jackeen newspaper columnists.
One goal of the project is to get other farmers in a similar position to provide their prices anonymously, building towards a real-time picture other farmers can bring with them into sales discussions.
In the selfishly driven world of track, Phil Healy was the consummate team player
Get away with the gang: 13 staycation choices for big family or friend groups
‘I’ve become aware of how Irishness is considered abroad, how much it can be weaponised’
‘I need to keep working’: The people aiming to stay employed until at least 66
“I’m only a small farmer but there’s lots of me,” Kennedy says. Transparency can lead to better outcomes, he believes, and as the steward of a herd of grass-finished beef, he would eventually like to see a system where the traceability of the premium product goes all the way to the home or restaurant.
The site is built using a mixture of AI tools including Claude and ChatGPT, in a practice known a “vibe-coding” where apps can be created using descriptive language, without the level of technical knowledge that would have been required in the past.
It has become a hobby for Kennedy, superior to watching TV, he says, but despite the utility of the generative AI models, it does require some sacrifice. “I was up at 5am this morning, working on it between 5am and 7am before I went to work,” he says.
A stand against generative AI
“AI is like having a knife,” Oren Etzioni, the chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI, once said. “You can use it to cut bread or to hurt someone. It’s up to us to decide how to use it.”
The knife can be used to reveal beef prices, but it can also be used to create 100,000 samey posters for local events and GAA summer camps, it emerges.
If you’ve been to a community noticeboard or on Facebook in the past few years, you’ll know what we’re talking about. They’re loud, they’re dynamic, they often have around 40 per cent too much information and, between the odd ethereal glow, bulging text and smiling cartoon figures, they’re more than a little uncanny.
The advent of generative AI has been a game-changer for those with a budget of zero and almost no chance of personally creating an eye-catching flyer. Some object to the practice on the basis of data centre resource usage, or displacement of artists.
But Overheard is primarily an aesthete, and our objection is on the grounds of taste: if sports clubs from Fermanagh to Fiji have the same automated style, fatigue begins to grow.
And it’s not just sports clubs: many charities, politicians, pubs and restaurants, bands, parades and even art exhibitions have jumped on the bandwagon.
The Thomas House, a punk pub on Dublin’s Thomas Street, made some waves last week when it said it was no longer accepting AI posters or flyers. “We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest art college, lads. It’s not a good look,” said the statement. The National College of Art and Design, repository of aspiring visual communications professionals, is a stone’s throw away.
“Consider this the start of the end of it,” the rock bar said. Is this the first shot fired in the counter-revolution?
An Irish answer to sushi
Fishing for a wan sausage in a bowl of coddle recently, Overheard was struck by the unexpected realisation that the brothy dish is not a million miles from a bowl of ramen if you ignore most of the specifics. That insight may be helpful to whoever wins Bord Bia’s contract to help sell Irish food to the Japanese.
We could find no data on levels of awareness of Ireland in general among the sushi-eaters, but anecdotally, Overheard’s recent holiday to the island nation saw one Osaka chef enter a deep think upon learning his guests were Irish, only to offer: “John Lennon?”
Still, we’ve got what they need: seafood, high-quality beef and something called “ingredient cheese”, a semi-finished form of cheese exported for further processing that they already buy from us. So Bord Bia is seeking an agency to “build the distinctive reputation of the Irish food and drink industry overall and the unique selling points of its key sectors”. Up to €488,000 is on the table for the winning comms shop.
Seafood in particular seems like an opportunity here. Of Ireland’s €138 million worth of food exports to Japan in 2025, €15.5 million came from the briny deep. That’s less than 0.2 per cent of the €13 billion or so the Japanese spend each year on importing seafood, so a slightly thicker slice of that particular tuna could pay large dividends.
Swimming, slithering and soaring
“I am a strong wild boar,” the bard Amergín declaimed as the first Gaels arrived to Ireland. “I am a salmon in the water.” It seemed outlandish at the time, but this approach to nature has found new backers.
A news story from Britain this week revealed that “eighteen people have spent six weeks swimming, slithering and soaring as otters, salmon, earthworms, red deer and kestrels in an attempt to better document the risks for wild animals in a human-dominated landscape”.
The research study on behalf of the ecological not-for-profit ASRA and the University of the West of England in Bristol invited various people to literally pretend to be animals along the river Tone and to document the feelings they imagined their kindred beasts would experience.
Dogs were an issue for one of the otters. “If I had been a human, I would have said: ‘Dogs in the river is a major problem for otters, with flea treatments entering the water’,” participant Anita Roy told The Guardian.
“As an otter, the testimony came out absolutely viscerally: ‘I hate dogs!’ I was really taken aback.”
The writer of the Guardian article’s name, ominously for the otters, was Patrick Barkham.
