We’re about four miles outside Westport, Co Mayo, on the Galway road side. Most of my life I played soccer for Westport United. Our biggest achievement was winning the Junior Cup back in 2005. It doesn’t happen too often, a small town winning a national cup. I was captain at the time.
We used to have beef cattle, but Dad got out of it about 10 years ago. There’s six of us and no one had any interest in taking on the farm. Dad has been leasing it out the last few years. He was kind of hoping one of us would take it on when he was getting out, but there was just no money in beef farming.
Brian Kennedy working on the snail farm.
I was watching Ear to the Ground one evening and a snail farm came on. I thought: “Jesus that’s something so different.” We had been looking between us for a good while to do something with the farm.
Then I went to see a couple of snail farms in operation and just started researching it. It snowballed from there. I spoke to my brother Declan and convinced him, we’re in it together. We took the plunge after Christmas 2019 and started Westport Escargot.
We were lucky with the timing. I know COVID-19 wasn’t great for everybody, but the timing of lockdown for us with this was just perfect. Declan runs a bus company. I’m a train driver. His buses were parked up from day one, so he was free.
The snail pen was built over lockdown.
We built the structure for the snail farm ourselves. It took about three months to actually build the pen itself. Declan is very handy, he can turn his hand to anything. He designed it all and did all the drawings for it. He’d be very good that way. I don’t think we realised ourselves how big of a project the building of it was until we got stuck in.
It’s built on half an acre. In year one we said we’d farm half of that, so we’re working on a quarter of an acre at the moment, even though we’ve built the half acre. Year two or year three, we’ll possibly fill the whole lot, that’s the plan.
Brian and Declan built the structure themselves.
Nitty-gritty
There’s 120,000 snails in there at the moment. We’re hoping to have anywhere between 450,000 to 500,000 in the next few weeks. The plot is planted with oilseed rape, they live off the greens and we supplement it with powdered feed. 
We give them a sprinkle of that every two days, just across the boards.
Then it’s supervision after that. We just keep an eye on the whole thing, that nothing is getting in to attack the snails, that’s a big worry. Rats would be the big danger, but you’ve just got to watch it. We’ve it completely covered in with bird netting too.
We’ll harvest the snails once a year, you can do it over a couple of weeks. Once they’re picked and bagged and it gets down to a certain temperature, they hibernate away.
There’s no place in Ireland that processes snails. In Ireland at the moment they’re classified as meat. Most other countries have them classified as shellfish. The regulations to process meat, you have to set up an abattoir, a slaughter house. There are more guidelines to processing meat. If it was in the shellfish category it would be a lot easier to do.
A newborn snail.
There’s a couple of options we’re considering in terms of selling them. We could sell them live, direct to France, Spain or Italy, there’s even a market in the UK for them. Or we can go down the route of sending them abroad, getting them processed into jars, getting them back and then selling.
That’s something we’re working on at the moment. Year one is just all about getting them out there, getting a sale on them and building on it from there.
The project so far, I’ve really liked it. It’s something totally different, something away from the norm. We’re learning so much everyday about it and even about the snails themselves, how they go about their daily routine.
Westport Escargot is a new venture on the Kennedy's farm.
If you go up during the day you won’t see them, you’ll only see them if you’re up in the evening. They do all their bits and pieces at night, then they go into hiding again. They’re fascinating creatures.
Dad’s delighted. That’s part of the reason too we got into it, he always said he’d love something done with the farm. He loves the daily routine. He does be pottering around with it himself, keeping an eye on it and that sort of thing.
We’re about four miles outside Westport, Co Mayo, on the Galway road side. Most of my life I played soccer for Westport United. Our biggest achievement was winning the Junior Cup back in 2005. It doesn’t happen too often, a small town winning a national cup. I was captain at the time.
We used to have beef cattle, but Dad got out of it about 10 years ago. There’s six of us and no one had any interest in taking on the farm. Dad has been leasing it out the last few years. He was kind of hoping one of us would take it on when he was getting out, but there was just no money in beef farming.
Brian Kennedy working on the snail farm.
I was watching Ear to the Ground one evening and a snail farm came on. I thought: “Jesus that’s something so different.” We had been looking between us for a good while to do something with the farm.
Then I went to see a couple of snail farms in operation and just started researching it. It snowballed from there. I spoke to my brother Declan and convinced him, we’re in it together. We took the plunge after Christmas 2019 and started Westport Escargot.
We were lucky with the timing. I know COVID-19 wasn’t great for everybody, but the timing of lockdown for us with this was just perfect. Declan runs a bus company. I’m a train driver. His buses were parked up from day one, so he was free.
The snail pen was built over lockdown.
We built the structure for the snail farm ourselves. It took about three months to actually build the pen itself. Declan is very handy, he can turn his hand to anything. He designed it all and did all the drawings for it. He’d be very good that way. I don’t think we realised ourselves how big of a project the building of it was until we got stuck in.
It’s built on half an acre. In year one we said we’d farm half of that, so we’re working on a quarter of an acre at the moment, even though we’ve built the half acre. Year two or year three, we’ll possibly fill the whole lot, that’s the plan.
Brian and Declan built the structure themselves.
Nitty-gritty
There’s 120,000 snails in there at the moment. We’re hoping to have anywhere between 450,000 to 500,000 in the next few weeks. The plot is planted with oilseed rape, they live off the greens and we supplement it with powdered feed.
We give them a sprinkle of that every two days, just across the boards.
Then it’s supervision after that. We just keep an eye on the whole thing, that nothing is getting in to attack the snails, that’s a big worry. Rats would be the big danger, but you’ve just got to watch it. We’ve it completely covered in with bird netting too.
We’ll harvest the snails once a year, you can do it over a couple of weeks. Once they’re picked and bagged and it gets down to a certain temperature, they hibernate away.
There’s no place in Ireland that processes snails. In Ireland at the moment they’re classified as meat. Most other countries have them classified as shellfish. The regulations to process meat, you have to set up an abattoir, a slaughter house. There are more guidelines to processing meat. If it was in the shellfish category it would be a lot easier to do.
A newborn snail.
There’s a couple of options we’re considering in terms of selling them. We could sell them live, direct to France, Spain or Italy, there’s even a market in the UK for them. Or we can go down the route of sending them abroad, getting them processed into jars, getting them back and then selling.
That’s something we’re working on at the moment. Year one is just all about getting them out there, getting a sale on them and building on it from there.
The project so far, I’ve really liked it. It’s something totally different, something away from the norm. We’re learning so much everyday about it and even about the snails themselves, how they go about their daily routine.
Westport Escargot is a new venture on the Kennedy's farm.
If you go up during the day you won’t see them, you’ll only see them if you’re up in the evening. They do all their bits and pieces at night, then they go into hiding again. They’re fascinating creatures.
Dad’s delighted. That’s part of the reason too we got into it, he always said he’d love something done with the farm. He loves the daily routine. He does be pottering around with it himself, keeping an eye on it and that sort of thing.
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