The Fisher & Farmer Foundation
Keep It, Wild
Wild rivers. Open land. Good food. Real sport. No birthright required.
Fisher & Farmer operates across the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union through a corporate structure built from day one to pursue B Corp certification and to fund this foundation. We are not asking for handouts. Our publishing, commerce, and consultancy work generates real revenue. Our Minnow Rewards programme turns every subscriber and every transaction into a small act of resistance. Our B Corp–certified entities bid on commercial contracts — including school meals supply, where we intend to bring locally sourced, scratch-cooked food to Irish classrooms — and the margins from that work flow directly into conservation, education, and community defence. When corporations come for the seaweed rights, when rivers lose their guardians, when children get served reheated slop from another continent — we use traditional commercial success to fight back.
Let's be honest about something. Ethics are subjective. Right and wrong are debatable, and good people have argued about both since language was invented. We are not here because we cracked some moral code. We are here because we looked at the world and decided we wanted to live in a different one — one where a kid from a council estate can cast a fly on the same river as a duke, where a single mother in Galway eats the same quality of food as a hedge fund manager in Manhattan, where a nine-hole links on a Gaeltacht island stays open for locals instead of becoming another private-equity holiday let. If that is selfish, fine. It is selfish. We are designing the world we want to live in, and we are using every commercial tool we have to build it.
Fisher & Farmer covers books, food, travel, and the working landscape across the American South, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. This foundation is what happens when a company decides that land access, wild food, and sporting life should not be the preserve of the tweedy set. We built a B Corp business model — subscriber-powered, commercially competitive — that generates the means to act. To buy the river beat before the syndicate does. To hold the seaweed rights before the multinationals take them. To put the mobile classroom on the road before another generation grows up believing that salmon comes from a farm and golf is for rich people. We earn the right to do this work. Then we do it.
Foundation Initiatives
Our Projects
The Salmon’s Story Needs to Travel
The Connemara Salmon School teaches the full story of wild Atlantic salmon — from river to plate, from migration to hatchery, from traditional fly-tying to the urgent fight against open-net pen farming. Advocacy, education, and the culinary culture celebrating this threatened species.
Now we need to take that story on the road. We're raising funds for an all-electric Goupil G4 box van — a compact utility vehicle with a 3m³ enclosed body, 199km range, and over 1,000kg payload — to be fitted out as a self-contained mobile classroom for fly-tying workshops, culinary demonstrations, film screenings, and biodiversity sessions across the west of Ireland.
Every River Has a Guardian
The property at Derrintin, Leenane, sits at the heart of the Erriff system — the River Erriff, Lough Derrintin, and Lough Tawnyard — one of Ireland's premier salmon fisheries, where Inland Fisheries Ireland has conducted research on salmon and sea trout migration for over three decades.
Lough Derrintin holds a good stock of wild brown trout and feeds directly into the wider system that sustains salmon and sea trout runs throughout the season. Acquiring this land means protecting the lake, its riparian corridors, spawning habitat, and water quality, while also stewarding the upland grazing that has sustained hill sheep farming in this valley for centuries. Salmon and lamb are not separate stories here — they share a landscape, and that landscape needs a permanent guardian.
The property includes farm buildings that we intend to convert into a licensed seaweed hatchery, aligned with Bord Iascaigh Mhara's national programme to develop sustainable macro-algae cultivation in Ireland. BIM's Seaweed Development Services programme funds hatchery research into native species with high-value applications in food, pharmaceuticals, and bioeconomy — and Ireland's Macro-Algal Strategy aims to shift the sector from wild harvesting to regenerative aquaculture. A hatchery at Derrintin, at the head of Killary Harbour with direct Atlantic access, would sit at the intersection of salmon conservation, seaweed science, and the kind of diversified rural economy that keeps communities alive. The farm buildings are there. The water is there. The science is ready.
Some Places Hold the Memory
A 240-year-old Georgian estate on the Newport River, one of Ireland's great salmon rivers, where heritage hospitality and wild fishery management converge. Newport House is the foundation's flagship — a living monument to how we once knew how to live alongside rivers.
Restoring Newport House means creating a permanent home for the foundation, a base for the Connemara Salmon School, and a destination that proves heritage and conservation are not at odds with one another — they are the same thing.
Newport House →
An Island That Plays
Connemara Isles Golf Club sits on 56 acres of Annaghavane Island in the heart of the Connemara Gaeltacht — a nine-hole links course designed by Tom Craddock and Pat Ruddy, with a causeway bridge to a linked island, pre-famine cottage ruins bordering the sixth green, and Ireland's only thatched clubhouse, built in 1850 by a survivor of the Brig St. John famine ship. It is one of the most joyful and unpretentious golf courses in the country, and it is for sale.
Acquiring Connemara Isles means preserving fun, accessible, community golf on the Wild Atlantic Way. But it also means securing something rarer: the property carries appurtenant seaweed harvesting rights — traditional rights tied to the land folio, confirmed by the Attorney General in 2018 as legally protected. Right now, Canadian-owned multinationals are filing industrial harvesting applications across the Connemara coast. Placing these rights inside a foundation — permanently, irrevocably — is how you fight that. Not with petitions. With a chequebook and a deed of transfer.
The surrounding waters are famous for natural oyster and scallop beds, and the island sits within a living cultural landscape of Galway Hooker regattas, currach racing, and Irish-speaking communities. This is coastal stewardship in its fullest sense — land, sea, sport, language, and tradition held together.
A Place for Everyone
Autism Friendly Connemara is a nonprofit initiative working to make the region genuinely welcoming and accessible for autistic individuals and their families — as visitors, as residents, and as full participants in community life.
The programme works with local businesses, tourism providers, schools, and community organisations to develop autism-friendly practices, sensory-considerate environments, and training that moves beyond awareness into meaningful inclusion. Connemara's landscape — its quiet spaces, open horizons, and slower rhythms — already offers much of what many autistic people find restorative. Our work is to ensure the communities within that landscape are equally welcoming.
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Hands in the Soil, Eyes on the System
Lowland Farms is a 14-acre diversified family farm on Johns Island, South Carolina, founded in 2011 by Kenneth “Skinny” Melton and his family. The farm specialises in heirloom vegetables, flowers, and eggs — all grown using organic methods, free of synthetic pesticides or fertiliser, with seeds sourced almost entirely from heirloom stock. It supplies leading Charleston restaurants and runs a popular CSA programme that has been feeding Lowcountry families for over a decade.
Our field learning programme brings school groups onto this working farm to learn permaculture design, regenerative agriculture, and the living science of healthy food systems. Students don't watch a presentation — they test soil pH, plant heirloom seeds, build compost layers, harvest seasonal vegetables, and trace the path from root system to restaurant plate. The farm is registered with the South Carolina Department of Agriculture for school visits, with restrooms, covered picnic areas, a greenhouse, and on-site transport.
Programmes span K–12 and cover six areas: soil science and seed saving, regenerative farm systems (cover cropping, no-till, nutrient cycling), pollinator ecology and biodiversity, farm-to-fork harvest and meal preparation, permaculture design principles, and Lowcountry coastal ecology — including how regenerative practices build climate resilience on barrier islands facing saltwater intrusion and sea-level rise. Each visit is seasonal, hands-on, and aligned with South Carolina science standards.
Permaculture is not just a farming technique — it is a design philosophy rooted in three ethics: earth care, people care, and fair share. Students learn to observe and work with natural systems, applying principles that run from the soil food web to the structure of their own communities. Every child who pulls a carrot from Johns Island clay and eats it on the spot is changed by that experience. We intend to make that moment available to every student in the Lowcountry.
The river does not check your background. The coastline does not ask for your credentials. We intend to keep it that way.
Join the Fight
We earn most of what we need. When we ask, it is because the opportunity will not wait.
Supporter
Fund the mobile classroom, support the Connemara Salmon School's advocacy work, or contribute to Autism Friendly Connemara's training programmes.
Give NowPatron
Protect the Derrintin waterways and Connemara Isles. Your name joins a permanent register of those who secured these rivers, hillsides, and islands for future generations.
Become a PatronCircle
Legacy donors and institutional partners. Private briefings, naming opportunities, and a role in shaping conservation and reform across our projects.
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