Whether we’re talking about textiles or vegetables, collaboration with other people is the thing that makes it work.
The colour of a flax field is water reflecting the sky; a cerulean haze of dancing stems. The sound of a flax field is the beating of wings. Of buff-tailed bumble bees, marsh fritillaries, swollen-thighed beetles, and flocks of linnets.
A scene that, on the island of Ireland, had been resigned to collective memory, until recently; between the fields and those who worked them back when Belfast was known as Linenopolis.
Growing for a diversity of needs, from food to fibre, protected flax producers from the devastation of the potato famine. Today, despite its rich history, it’s near-impossible to get your hands on Irish-grown linen.
Thrive
On Mallon Farm in County Tyrone, Helen Keys and Charlie Mallon are reviving the tradition of growing flax for fibre; following the two-thousand-year path Irish farmers sowed before them.
Grown as part of a rotation of chemical-free potatoes, oats, and grasses, their blue blossoms are broadcast with an antique fiddle, harvested by hand, retted in rainwater, scutched on a restored turbine, and threaded into local supply chains.
After years of feeling beaten by conventional agriculture, converting their once dairy farm into a nature-friendly patchwork of food and fibre transformed more than the fields.
“We’ve gone from feeling like farming was this huge weight around our necks”, Helen reflects, “to being completely in love with what we’re doing”. She confesses to excitedly counting down the summer days until the sea of flax is ready to be gathered by careful hands.
Flax remembers the Irish earth well, requiring little more than rainwater to thrive. “Northern Ireland can grow flax.”, says Helen, “You just put it in, leave it alone, and it just grows like anything. We don’t need to buy anything else in”.
Growers
Rather than taking land away from food production, growing flax for fibre forms part of a sustainable food production system. “Flax is a rotational crop”, adds Charlie, “you can’t plant it in the same field every year. Prior to putting flax in, one of the best things you can plant is potatoes.” Listening closely to the land’s memories, Helen and Charlie’s quiet devotion has been rejuvenating the soil, waterways and wildlife on Mallon Farm, all while feeding local supply chains.
“Like a lot of farmers, over the years, we lost a bit of our connection with the land and our understanding of the land. You’re being told exactly what you can do and there is very little flexibility built into the system.”
Helen shares her frustration with government payment systems that require maximum productivity, leaving no room for the disarray and unpredictability of the living world. In a perfect act of defiance, the farm, in its new wildness, is more prosperous than ever.
“We had no idea when we first put the flax out into the world that it would be used for so many different things…Farming becomes so much more when you start working with other people who can do so much more with it.”
Whether we’re talking about textiles or vegetables, collaboration with other people is the thing that makes it work.
It’s not just linnets who are flocking to the fields once more. Neighbours, family, retired growers, and textile makers pass each other regularly on the narrow lane up to Mallon Farm.
Community
Having previously found farming a lonely business, the interest and support from others have been highlights for Helen. As well as company, these connections bring more and more strength to this unfolding tale of resistance.
“We’re not interested in recreating an industry that has a huge mill as a bottleneck where one person is making all the money. Whether we’re talking about textiles or vegetables, collaboration with other people is the thing that makes it work.”
From offering hands and hours during harvesting season, to donating long-unused processing machinery, the farm has started to germinate seeds of generosity. “People come to the farm and volunteer, and it creates this kind of amazing tidal wave”.
This hope is warmly welcomed given the scale of their ambition. “I've done a lot of thinking about how we bring the industry back in a way that's more resilient, more sustainable”, says Helen.
She is keen to encourage diversified, small-scale supply chains, replicated many times over at the community level; growing the industry sideways to reinforce its strength, rather than upwards.
Eager
Diversity is important in the fields, too. On an island where 92 percent of agricultural land is used for meat and dairy production, attempting to shift the status quo towards agroecological farming is no mean feat.
To borrow words from Kerry Melville of Nourish NI, the fields of Ireland can be considered a type of monoculture. But it is diversity, not uniformity, that brings resilience: to new policies, unpredictable weather patterns, and price increases. Something old Irish farmers held close when terming flax ‘the rent crop’ upon losing their potatoes to blight.
Revisiting each stage of production is challenging. Flax requires thirteen stages of processing, some easier to recover than others.
Charlie spent many painstaking hours restoring a 1940s scutching turbine, which now frees delicate fibres from dried woody stems. Spinning is the next big hurdle; an art that seems to have disappeared entirely, save a few modest individuals.
Helen and Charlie have a list a mile long of eager customers knocking on the farm doors for freshly spun and woven Irish linen fabric.
Determination
“We realized early on that the interest from people wasn't just about honouring heritage. We got much more interest from people who were concerned with it being locally produced, sustainably produced fabric, and something that could form part of a really beneficial food and farming system.”
Until the spinning obstacle has been overcome, the farm’s many visitors have come to the rescue yet again. From using the raw scutched fibres as a replacement for fur on fashion garments, to exploring its potential as a composite substitute for traditional carbon fibre, and its role in sealing plumbing joints, no stone has been left unturned when it comes to restoring Irish faith in flax.
“One thing I am really hopeful about is when I sit in meetings with big corporations, they are all talking about what the consumer wants. And trust me, they are absolutely driven by what the consumer wants. So don’t think for one second you don’t have power as a consumer. You absolutely do…There is potential to change for the better.”
Helen’s belief is infectious, as Irish writer Abby Oliveira can attest to. Her poem The Opposite of Apocalypse captures the story of Mallon Farm, she reflects: “[This project] was serendipitously important for me on a personal level, having become despondent and resigned to the environmental crisis. I was amazed by their resilience, their determination to change the habits of a lifetime and most importantly to help raise that rising tide that lifts all boats.”
It is this determination that has turned a dwindling dairy farm into an epicentre of innovation for the future of food and farming on the island of Ireland.
This Author
Amber Hayward is an environment writer who works on communications for The Gaia Foundation. Her recent work includes contributing to the book We Feed The UK, published by Papadakis.
We Feed The UK is an unprecedented alliance between the arts and agroecology, grown by The Gaia Foundation, pairing photographers and poets with inspiring custodians of seed, soil and sea. What emerges from these radical encounters is unexpected: ten time-critical tales, rich with radical defiance against the domination of industrial farming. These stories have the potential to seed a system that positively impacts inextricable issues from climate to community, through food which nourishes human and more-than-human kind.
In Country Tyrone in Northern Ireland, Helen Keys and Charlie Mallon have sown a diverse tapestry of food and fibre, bringing resilience, heritage, and community to the Irish farming system once more. Their story, the eighth in the series, was captured over 12 months through the lens of documentary photographer, Yvette Monahan, and in the beautiful words of Irish writer, Abby Oliveira, in her poem The Opposite of Apocalypse. Yvette’s exhibition The Clean Blue of Linen is being displayed at Belfast Exposed until 22 March 2025, and as part of The Complete Collection of Photography and Poetry exhibited at The Royal Photographic Society between 3 April and 22 June 2025.
