How do you fit complicated conversations about food system transformation into Ireland’s Largest Music and Cultural Festival? Well, for 18 years Cultivate – the organisation involved in the living lab in Cloughjordan – has done just that. Cultivate’s Davie Philip (EU4Advice) and Oliver Moore (CODECS) explain how.  

Electric Picnic is a unique, annual, weekend-long music and arts festival held in Stradbally, County Laois, Ireland. It’s Ireland’s largest gathering of its kind, offering a diverse experience beyond just music to include art, theater, comedy, food, and holistic therapies across over 27 stages and areas. The festival attracts large crowds, well over 80,000 people, and is known for its immersive atmosphere and a commitment to sustainability. 

The Global Green is the name of the pop-up ecovillage at the festival where art, activism, creativity and performance converge. Since 2007 Cultivate, the sustainability collective based in Cloughjordan, have coordinated this sustainability area.

It is an enormous undertaking, involving hundreds of people and dozens of things – some static, some interactive, some fully programmed for most of the available hours of the day. 

People from 18 to 70+ who are involved in our living lab, are core to all aspects of Global Green,  from build to delivery to take down.  

For three days and nights a collection of artists, makers, musicians, foodies, poets and activists from over 40 organisations and groups from across Ireland run things. It’s a compact area  packed with art, quirky seating, stalls, biodiversity and artivism tents.

In the Field 

All aspects of doing food differently, from gardening to distribution, policy to practice, feature in our pop up ecovillage.

We create a tranquil diverse garden oasis with Community Gardens Ireland, featuring vibrant art, a riot of plants offering an array of creative hands-on activities and conversations with punters. This year an individual community garden called Mud Island participated, bringing the uniqueness of a very urban yet island location near Dublin city to the field. 

On the edge of the garden Talamh Beo, Ireland’s agroecological farming organisation, had a tent highlighting practical ways to build food sovereignty and local food economies. 

With them Cloughjordan Community Farm, providing food for the caterers, and a bike powered apple press for juicing heritage windfall varieties from the ecovillage where our living lab is based.

All our caterers had a local food story to tell, including our own back stage crew food. 

In the Tent

Elements of Change is Global Green’s engagement and music tent offering a dynamic program with cutting edge panel discussions, spoken word, theatre and comedy during the day with live music and DJs into the early hours. 

We (Ollie Moore and Davie Philip from Cultivate) curate a three-day program with a big focus on how we transform our food systems. We are both part of the Feeding Ourselves Community of Practice bringing together local food producers, community initiatives, researchers, and advocates from across the agri-food, land use, and local development sectors.  

Additionally, we manage living labs for two Horizon European projects: CODECS, which examines agri-food digitisation with an emphasis on online farmers’ markets, and EU4Advice, which focuses on developing training and support for Short Food Supply Chain Advisors and Local Food Facilitators.

And this is in part why we wanted to bring these ideas and practices to the sustainability part of an 80,000 person festival.

Day by Day

Friday afternoon kicked off the programme with a dynamic session where we all told each other about who we are and what we’re doing here – we all shared the stories and interconnected themes of the activists and socially engaged artists participating over the three days.

The first discussion on the Saturday afternoon Food System Transformation got right into it. We discussed the potential of local food economies and innovative approaches to reshape the wider agri-food system — aiming for a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient way to feed ourselves. This was facilitated by Davie and included Rupa Marya, the doctor, activist, musician formally based in San Francisco, now Professor of Land, Food and Medicine Trinity College Dublin; Thomas O’Connor from Talamh Beo; Evonne Boland of the Open Food Network and Ollie Moore of CODECS. 

The conversation went deep exploring where we are at, where we want to go and offered some insightful approaches on how we might transform the local food economy and support local food producers. This included in particular a focus on  the role of institutions as anchors via better public procurement policies.

This session was followed by a screening of the film Farming Is Medicine. Rupa Marya features, and it flips the food system on its head  – it helps us reimagine how a food system rooted in deep care works. The land needs to be regenerated, but on a very deep level with justice at its core. 

After the screening Ollie Moore held a conversation with Rupa Marya about decolonising agriculture and community health from rooftop gardens in the US and Bethlehem to hospitals in Ireland and the fields of the West Bank. 

Ireland has much to tell about being colonised, about resisting colonisation, and about functioning under the spectre of colonisation. A central message we both focused on was about how and why Ireland has so little local food infrastructure – the answer is, in many ways, the legacy of extractivism.   

Following this, we naturally flowed into a session was held on how La Via Campesina members Talamh Beo (Ireland) and UAWC (Union of Agriculture Work Committees, Palestine) have forged ever deepening connections in recent months and practical ways to support Palestinian farmers, their rights, campaigns and organisations.

You can read about that here of by clicking the image above.

Sunday afternoon featured a humorous and powerful play What Are We Eatin’ Anyways? inspired by The Local Green Box, an online farmers’ market in County Cavan. The drama used humor and compelling storytelling to explore the hidden costs of modern food systems, such as packaging, waste, and the disconnect from food origins, while simultaneously highlighting the advantages of choosing local food.

We also hosted The Power of Community, our final discussion in the Elements of Change tent with Maeve Foreman of Mud Island Community Garden, Thomas O’Connor from Talamh Beo, Joanne Butler, OURganic Gardens and Dee Sewell, Carlow County Council’s Environmental Awareness Officer. They discussed community gardens, community supported agriculture, food hubs, and the potential of local food facilitators as catalysts for climate resilience and community wellbeing. 

The Global Green at Electric Picnic showed how art, film, theatre, and creative dialogue can make complex food system issues accessible. Festivals powerful spaces to cultivate curiosity and inspire change, with effects reaching far beyond the event.