Seven years ago, in 2016, Iowa-born Fox and her husband Niall Mac an tSionnaigh, from Booterstown, Co Dublin, were living and renting in San Francisco. With their eldest daughter about to start school, the couple wanted to buy a house but got frustrated with the properties available locally. “We decided on a whim to check daft.ie and see what we could get in Ireland for the price of a house in San Francisco,” laughs Fox.

Her grandparents were homesteaders – “they had a house cow for milk and if you wanted fried chicken, it had been butchered that morning” – and she longed to get back to the country.

She certainly managed that when she and Mac an tSionnaigh found their six-acre farm on the side of a mountain in Glencree, Co Wicklow. “We wanted to instil some sense of self-sufficiency in our kids but it was a big leap. We had to acclimatise to a new environment and a new way of living.”

While their children – they have three girls – were born in San Francisco, Fox was keen to show them a different way of life. “I wanted to find a deeper meaning – there had to be more than is offered in the modern world of coffee shops and [retail chain] Target and traffic jams. I just wanted to live my life. I had grown up eating wild meat, hunting and fishing – my family are all outdoorsmen – and I had a deep appreciation for that kind of experience,” she says.

Her upbringing made her acutely sensitive to the food world around her: “I was always into local food systems… I wanted to live more consciously.”

Fox had been actively involved in local food networks in San Francisco – “shopping through co-ops and farmers’ markets,” raising chickens in her backyard and baking sourdough for her family. She wanted to grow more of her own food and with the purchase of River Run Farm she had the land for it. Gardening and growing led directly to preservation and many adventures in fermentation, which she credits as her learning curve. “I developed all these skills right here,” she says. “I started from scratch and built a recipe. You just have to fail a lot to figure it out.”

Her enthusiasm was infectious, and a group of local women soon enquired about lessons.

The first classes took place in 2017 in her kitchen as she developed her curriculum. Now Fox holds her popular classes in a purpose-built space on the farm incorporating a wood-fired oven, teaching students practical ways of making the most of their own food systems by preserving and fermenting and baking with local ingredients.

“We do an Introduction to sourdough bread workshop, which teaches you how to make a sourdough loaf, incorporating some whole grains. We also look at local food systems and community food systems.”

For more advanced bakers, Fox’s workshop on working with Irish wholemeal flour focuses on loaves with a higher nutritional value using Irish-grown flours which she sources – after much searching – from a variety of Irish growers and millers, including Oak Forest Mills in Kilkenny, Monaghan’s Irish Organic Mill, Ballymore Organics in Co Kildare and Louth’s Dunany Flour.

Having been involved with the local wheat movement in San Francisco, Fox did a deep dive into the Irish flour system when she moved to Ireland and was initially mystified that there wasn’t more locally grown flour on the market.

It’s taken some time but now she can access rye from Andrew in Louth, spelt from Emma in Kilkenny, Mark and Micheál’s whole grain flour from Monaghan and “the most delicious oats” from James in Kildare. “I want to know where everything comes from,” says Fox. “That connection with people gives you a real taste of place; it makes everything taste sweeter.”

She also teaches an introduction to fermentation workshop, which focuses on sauerkraut (“I’m always amazed that people want to learn about partially rotten cabbage!”) and kombucha. For the more advanced fermentationist Fox’s koji-miso-amazake and tempeh workshops have proved popular, focusing on making the most of local and regional beans, seeds, grains and nuts.

“The workshops are about meeting and getting to know new people with similar interests. We have really lovely groups and often people take one workshop together and come back and meet again on other workshops as friendships and communities develop,” says Fox.

Working with local food systems by maximising the use of local Irish-grown grains, vegetables and other foods opens a whole new world for many of the participants.

“People walk away very excited with the possibilities,” says Fox. “All those little things that you do, they all add up.”