We grow wheat across the farm, with strips of wildflowers and wild bird seed mixes blooming next to the 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 grow around 30 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 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 the arable fields when they are not growing crops.
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 try to keep the cattle out year-round by feeding them wildflower hay on the arable stubbles in the winter.
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. For our work joining these two habitats, we were awarded the 2015 Plantlife International Meadow Maker of the Year award for Wales and Dr Sarah Beynon was named as on of Wales’s ‘legendary people’ in the ‘Wales – Year of Legends’. The road between us and Dowrog Common has now been made an official ‘toad crossing’ site!
