See also food
I have a feeling that farming is very much part of the community - in a sense the year is organized around farming events: farmers and shepherds going and drinking in the pub, and being wonderfully noisy and singing, after the sheep shearing. The sheep dog trials, they always come to the pub after that. Ffair Nant of course used to be a sheep fair, 18th September every year.
Well we don’t know what is going to happen after November. All the subsidies are ending. We haven’t heard what’s coming next. It’s probably going to be taken off animals and food and put onto the environment. But what’ll happen in the meantime? Farmers think longer term than people making these decisions. How can we plan what to do? i think many farmers thought - think - there’ll be less red tape after Brexit. But I think there might even be more. I’m just thinking day to day now. But farming doesn’t really work like that. We’ve always kept the land by the river - my dad and his dad - to let things grow. We’ve got lots of rare plants down there now. Have you heard of the melancholy thistle? We’ve got those. The National Trust used to help us cut the grass so the seeds would go into the ground. But they’ve lost millions and they aren’t helping this year, so I don’t know how we are going to manage.
Agriculture is important as an engine to local communities - if a farmer has a pound, he spends a pound - but also it is the basis of language, culture, resisting second homes. Although many farmers here don’t live here.
It’s mostly sheep around here. On the lower ground maybe cows. Everyone used to keep a pig at some point as well. Time to kill it, and they’d share the meat around - its your turn this time they’d say.
There used to be lots more cows – there were more cattle farms when I was a kid.
I don’t really know which farmer owns which bit of land. Do any of them live here?
I only farm cows. I can’t be doing with sheep. They are so much trouble. There are always problems with them. And they just eat everything down to the ground. I think the cows are better for the land.
No, I don’t really worry about the future of farming - they’ve always changed what they want us to do. I was paid by the forestry to plant all those trees there. I’m happy to plant trees if they want that! I voted to stay, I think we - farmers - have got lots of money from Europe, and I think it was a mistake to vote out. Because what does Westminster know or care about us up here? But, I think it’ll be fine in the end. They’ll bring in something new. I don’t think they’ll stop paying money for things they want. Some farms in Nant make lots of money, the big farms, I think one farm gets £200,000 a year. They published it online and it caused an outrage. You can see on that that I get £700.
Some farms in the valley hardly farm at all. Fields are not being used. Meanwhile, we are importing 2.5m tonnes of soya. Using it to feed cattle and sheep that are kept inside to be finished off.
Glasdir isn’t just to make nice walls, or fences. Its to do a job - to manage the movement of the livestock. There were grants to exclude sheep from along the river, so the trees could maintain the river banks. But fences not maintained, trees are not regenerating, and the river banks are no better than they were before.
Of course the governing of the farming industry has contributed a lot of this since the war in particular, but before the war as well, how much bird habitat has been lost: draining, throwing chemicals on the land. You don’t see the fish you used to see when I was a kid. I used to see salmon swimming up the river when I was a kid. They aren’t there any more.
There’s a strong sense of tradition in the farms - some have been working the same land for generations. Doing the same thing, continuing the traditions of the land. It’s part of the culture, the language, the place. In some ways there’s a sense that this is very conservative, that we don’t want change. But there’s always been change, there’s always people telling farmers to do this and then to do that, it feels a bit like we have taken on a seige mentality in a way. People come in and try to tell us what to do. Now its the re-wilding. Planting trees. We like trees! We like planting trees. That’s what we do - we work with our land, but we would like it if people were respectful of what we know, rather than these - i don’t know - stereotypes? that farmers don’t care. That’s the attitude. Organisations are the same - they just try to tell us what to do. Look at what happened near Machynlleth.
I don’t really think of this land as farm land. I know it is. But its just basically sheep grazing and they move around. My image of farming is fields, flat land, cows and things growing like wheat, all neatly portioned off. Whereas here it is kind of haphazard, walls falling down, sheep wandering around. I know it really affects the landscape because of the grazing but I don’t think of it as farming so much. It’s hill farming. It’s very much in motion as opposed to a static thing.
I think the animals - the sheep - are worth bugger all. It’s the subsidies. I think we should give farmers money to keep the sheep off at least some of the land.
I take a few cattle to Ted’s land, at Y Fricsan, for a few months, because he wants them there. If you just leave the land, it will grow so quickly, everything will be like a jungle. Maybe that’s good in some places? But it’ll change what can live there. It’s good for me, to take the cattle round. I just give him a few lumps of meat. It’s good.
Matt grass is more dominant now on the hillsides because of over grazing.
The farmers and shepherds know the land really well - better than anyone. I don’t think they get enough credit for that, I think they feel under attack, like everyone is telling them what to do and not respecting their knowledge and experience.
I have talked to this farmer – he’s more like a hobby farmer really. I did have a discussion with him one day, because he had a lot of dis-information: he didn’t realise bogs hold carbon. He thought grasslands hold more carbon. I hardly ever walk this way anymore - it used to be my top favourite place, wild, wet, covered in trees, all those nooks and crannies for biodiversity… now, in the last few years, since the farmer retired from his construction business, he seems to have focused all his attention on the land here. He’s drained it, cut the trees, the rushes, fertilized the grass, cut off the footpaths. He says its for the sheep, that he has to make a living to feed his family. But does he really, does it really make money to have sheep? I did ask him about it. We had quite a heated discussion. He was a bit defensive, but he did say I could give him more information. I haven’t done that yet - its hard to come here. I just can’t bear to see it like this [ solastalgia]
We’ve been experimenting with pigs - curing the meat - and boxed lamb/mutton, selling directly to people Nant. It’s going really well. The price of meat is going up - maybe its Brexit, I don’t know. Yeah, good things might come from Brexit! I always thought we should keep things local. That’s how it should be.
Yeah, selling meat and produce locally. I think a lot of people would love that – if a shepherd isn’t selling their lamb through some trendy facebook marketing or something. How do people find out about it? If they are selling it off the books, there’s also that secret side, the bureaucracy that stops these things happening. Maybe that’ll have to change in the future. Maybe that’ll be a good thing from Brexit, that we can do things more freely, locally.
What’s going to happen to farming here with all that meat from America, the cholorinated chicken? We can’t compete with those prices and that low quality. And the beef that’s being bought from Brazil. They cut down the rainforest you know, to put cattle farms there and the rainforest is meant to be the most valuable thing we have. I just don’t understand why we let that happen? We farm beef, Aberdeen Angus, Charolet, why doesn’t Britain just eat its own beef rather than destroying the rainforest.
The time I’ve spent more recently with some welsh farmers, I was quite horrified at some of the really out moded ideas that some of them had in terms of dealing with the land, spraying, using old oil diesel to kill things off. I suppose I started to see them as outsiders in a way. Some have obviously moved on. But of the ones that aren’t changing, they don’t feel understood, they feel like outsiders and quite defensive about change.
I wonder if another thing that’s going wrong is that all the shepherds I’ve met, they are all really cool. They are amazing. They walk for miles, with their dogs, they know how to shear the sheep, they know what they are doing. But the farmers who aren’t active shepherds, I wonder if they are not on the land anymore, not working it as closely, and filling in subsidy forms - its not as connected.
I met this couple – radical hard core vegans from Leeds about 20 years ago – they bought a super exposed farmstead above Caernarfon. They tried growing veg, but it was a real struggle, its not as straight forward as they thought. So they realized that that is why there are sheep here, because they will grow. You need a mixture of both.
There’s more bracken and historical photos bear that out. I don’t know if it is less grazing or less management or changing climate. I’d like to know more about sheep farming, hill farming. What goes on, how it works, what is the future.
All these people here, they’ve got holiday homes, and they buy their house and then ask me if they can buy a bit of land. I’m sick and tired of it. This land has been in my family for generations, why would I sell it to someone who has been here a few months, or a few years? What do they know about how the land works. There isn’t much understanding of the culture, of the importance of farming. They love the mountains, and walking, and they don’t seem to realise that we are the ones keeping the landscape as it is. I think that’s weird. It’s annoying to be honest. I just want a bit of respect.
We’ve got 4 acres, and are renting another 90 acres. We’ve got 12 beef cows on the land - i think the rule of thumb is you can have one cow per acre. But we are combining beef production with maintentance of other habitats, we’ve got some boggy land, some scrub, some woodland. And we don’t feed them anything but grass (and hay), we don’t do any finishing off with soya or anything. Apparently that is really rare, but the soya thing is a disaster, environmentally, and for the health of the cows too. And it’s not necessary! Our cows reach their weight without it. People come from far and wide to see our cows, to buy the meat, knowing that we don’t use any feed. There’s a market in it. But we don’t know how to take the next jump, to go to say 60 cows. How to make that so it is a business that does more than cover costs.
It really annoys me when people get on their high horse and you know, vegans, not so much vegetarians, and they are all like ‘that’s wrong that you have cows, that you make beef’. But we have used the carbon calculator, and the way we manage the land and produce our beef means that we are carbon negative - we remove carbon! Whereas the vegans, with their soya beans and almond milk, that’s what’s causing the problems.
i dont think people realise how much diversity there is in farming. There is the massive industrial end of things, and there lies the problem. At the other end, small scale, working locally, supplying locally, doing things on a scale that mean you don’t have to pump the land and the animals full of stuff, that is a sustainable way to farm. It is really simplistic to say ‘oh you have to be vegan or vegetarian’. i’d say you need to become a ‘locavore’ - to eat locally, whatever comes locally is the way to go.
The whole thing is that its the factory farming, the intensive farming that we are against really. But a lot of people can’t afford to be, and I think this all sort of addresses the fact that we are getting cheap food and it is all subsidized by tax payers money so its not really cheap food, we pay for it ultimately.
The people who are getting subsidized are not usually the farmers, its going to big business, to big companies and yeah I think I don’t want to eat much meat but I’ll eat it occasionally. And at the beginning of the year we’d just eat a few bits of bacon a week. Its where it comes from is really important for me, particularly with meat, where it comes from.
I think farming is going through a really hard time. Maybe it’ll get better for pig farmers because of the problems in Denmark. That’d be great because the Danish pork is really poor quality.