How We Farm At Pontybat

How We Farm at Pontybat

Pontybat Farm hasn't been a working dairy farm for many years. When we bought it in 2012, it was home to rescue horses and a sawmill. What drew us to it was the land, and the dream of becoming self sufficient.

The years that followed were mixed. We bred chickens, had around 750 at our busiest, but as the business grew the smallholding got left behind. It took COVID to bring us back to it properly.

That period gave us time to dig vegetable beds, build a walk-in fruit frame from an old marquee, grow herbs outside the kitchen door, and prune the orchard for the first time. It was also when the pumpkin patch started. We hand hoed every row, cleared weeds by hand, and installed a rainwater tank for irrigation.

A couple of years later we had two large ponds built as part of our flood prevention work. Both have been left to seed naturally. This spring we'll be planting wildflower seed to bring more pollinators back to the farm.

We try to live within a cycle here. We make our own compost instead of buying it in. We preserve fruit and vegetables. There's very little food waste, which is handy when you've got chickens and sheep. Packaging that comes in with shop deliveries gets reused in the garden. Old wooden structures get repurposed, burned, or taken apart for something else. The ash goes back into the compost heap. Rainwater gets harvested in drums and used on the beds.

We don't use pesticides. The only spray we use for weeds is certified organic and doesn't harm the surrounding ground. We leave what we can to nature. The ants in the front garden have been there for years and have created the softest, most workable soil. The nettles that aren't in a wild area get dug up by hand, which is honestly one of my favourite jobs on the smallholding, done each Spring.

Next up is the garden behind the house. Perennial flowers and shrubs, somewhere to actually sit, and eventually my beehives. The bees already visit. We're just making it worth their while to stay.

Pontybat Farm looks like a different place to it did 15 years ago.  And now that the business runs alongside the smallholding closer than it ever did before, I'm excited to see what changes the next 15 years might bring.