Dr Sarah Beynon
Dr Sarah Beynon is a conservationist, farmer and academic ecologist who also appears regularly on our television screens. Sarah is the founding director of Dr Beynon’s Bug Farm (The Bug Farm) – a research and education centre, visitor attraction, farm and wildlife reserve focussed on the sustainable future of food, farming and nature recovery. The Bug Farm was the UK Best Start-Up Business of the Year in the FSB/Worldpay Business Awards.
Winner of the Royal Entomological Society’s Wallace Award for her doctorate on the importance of dung beetles to farmers, Sarah’s own research focus is on beneficial invertebrates in farmland and her work has been used to inform the protection of invertebrates in UK agri-environment schemes. Her current quest is to bring back the locally-extinct marsh fritillary butterfly to the St Davids peninsula and connect-up wildlife habitat by working with a series of project partners.
In 2018, Sarah developed the ‘St Davids Pollinator Trail‘, which led to St Davids being designated as Wales’s first ‘Bee Friendly’ city. The trail is being re-launched for 2024. Sarah inherited her award-winning Tyddewi Herd of Welsh Black cattle from her late parents and the herd are now a vital conservation grazing team, helping to restore natural habitats across the St Davids peninsula, including Sarah’s own 200-acre farm.
Her interest in farming insects for food led her and her chef husband Andy to launch Bug Farm Foods in 2017, where they innovate and produce a range of food made from farmed insects, including their famous Cricket Cookies and VEXo – an insect and plant protein mince that they developed with Welsh Government and Innovate UK, with the aim of getting it onto school menus to help reduce childhood obesity and highlight sustainable food choices: The project won the overall Go Wales Awards.
Sarah is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society, was named as one of Wales’s emerging legends in the 2017 Wales – Year of Legends, won Plantlife’s Meadow Maker of the Year for Wales in 2015, the 2019 Royal Agricultural Society’s Research Medal and was a finalist in The St David’s Awards Environment Champion category in 2022. Sarah continues to research, innovate and educate for a more sustainable future and is in the process of turning her farm into a Trust and changing legislation to help landowners protect land for nature, forever.
In her spare time, alongside her obsession with creating wildlife habitat, Sarah is passionate about rescuing animals and positive animal training. Sarah and Andy live together with their family of 26 cows, 3 horses, 2 chickens, 4 dogs, 4 goats and a tarantula called Rosie.
