We grow wheat and barley across the farm, with native arable plants blooming alongside our crops.
As one of Wales’s top 10 farms for rare arable plants, turning the soil annually is vital to allow these precious plants to bloom. We currently grow around 20 acres of spring wheat each year, without any pesticides, leaving wide un-sown margins and in-field areas for rare plants and ground-nesting farmland birds. The farm now supports significant numbers of breeding skylark and rare plants such as weasel’s-snout and sharp-leaved fluellen.
Our Tyddewi Herd of Welsh Black cattle graze our marshy grassland and heath.
The cattle graze our heath and marshy grasslands in the summer, helping to manage these habitats for wildlife.
We sow herbal leys to give land a break from arable production, which we graze with our Welsh Black cattle. Their dung is broken down by dung beetles and other dung fauna, fertilising the soils without the need for chemical fertilisers. These leys have the added benefits of helping reduce livestock internal parasites, providing resources for pollinators and improving the structure and fertility of the soil. We keep the cattle out year-round by feeding them wildflower hay on the arable stubbles in the winter and their dung and urine fertilises the fields ready for the next year’s crop.
We plant up to 100 m of native hedgerow trees each year and have, to date, dug twenty ponds across the farm to encourage more wildlife to visit us.
Our farm is now acting as a busy wildlife corridor between Dowrog Common and the St Davids Airfield Heaths, two disparate parts of the Northwest Pembrokeshire Commons Special Area of Conservation, that meet the northwest and southeast borders of the farm. The road between us and Dowrog Common has now been made an official ‘toad crossing’ site and our volunteers help thousands of amphibians cross the road each year!
We are passionate about wildflower meadows.
We have created at least 50 acres of wildflower hay meadows over the years. Sarah was named as Plantlife’s ‘Meadows Maker of the Year’ for Wales in 2015 for her work creating wildflower meadows. We cut the meadows each year for hay (always leaving un-cut areas for wildlife) and the flower-rich hay is always in demand. We sell our surplus hay to local farmers and horse owners, but feed the majority of the crop to our cattle, horses and goats.