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Farmer Stories

Ifan and Rhiannon Davies - TikTok, soil health and a father-daughter approach

Wales
Case Study
soil health
low inputs
Livestock
woodland
peatland

All imagery: Joanne Coates © for the Nature Friendly Farming Network

By almost any standards, Carreg-y-Bîg is off the beaten track. Located in the heart of Wales, about 20 miles from the towns of Welshpool and Newtown, the farm is three miles from the nearest asphalt road, and its track has six gates. This remote spot is where father-and-daughter team Ifan and Rhiannon Davies farm 220 acres of the Montgomeryshire Plateau in a nature-friendly way.

Ifan’s parents bought the farm and turned a collection of derelict, roofless buildings and neglected land covered in tussocky grass into a family home and a working operation. Initially, Ifan says his parents felt pressure to farm in an intensive way, but before he returned home to run the operation, this had changed to a more nature-friendly approach, with lower stock levels, hedge planting and the creation of new woodlands around the site.

Now Carreg-y-Bîg is home to around 225 ewes and 60 or so replacements, mostly North Country Cheviot sheep with a flock of around 30 Balwen Welsh Mountain sheep, a rare breed. This is a reduction from the 650 ewes plus replacements and a couple of dozen cows that were there when stock levels were highest. Ifan said the decision to farm in a lower-input system was arrived at for a variety of reasons, including the business’ bottom line.

With good soil, you can do anything.

Ifan Davies

“I was trying to get out of buying concentrate or bag feed, and I thought the quickest way to do that was to have fewer mouths to feed,” he said. “Winter’s always the hardest time here. If I can get through the winters without spending, it makes it a profitable system.”

To complement this further, Ifan has focused on improving soil health in order to increase summer cropping. Low levels of fertiliser use have been cut to nothing, and ploughing has been eradicated as much as possible. The farm has a low-tech approach, with the most expensive kit being the electric fence for rotational grazing. “With good soil, you can do anything,” Ifan says. “If the soils are well, everything else, the environmental and economic resilience and keeping everything in balance, will come.”

For Ifan, that concept of balance is crucial to making the farm work. “Financial viability and nature go hand in hand here,” he says. “You could spend a huge amount of time and energy draining land to make your fields square or ploughing, but this is moorland habitat, so it’s not viable to do that anyway. We farm with nature. We don’t farm for nature, it’s part of our ethos. While we’re farming, we’re also thinking about all the other things.”

The farm’s sheep do not have sheds and stay out on the rolling uplands all year round. Lambing takes place from the end of April to the start of June to make the most of the grass growth. Medication such as worming is kept to the absolute minimum. Between eight and 10 acres of turnips are planted each year, and hoggets graze them. Bales of oats grown on site are also rolled out on these fields, and these are eaten and trampled in to produce corn the following year, freeing the farm from the costs of buying in seed. The hogs are then kept until the following April, so they are around 11 months old when they leave the site.

Ifan also says a low-input system suits Carreg-y-Bîg because it enables him to get off-site to work five days a week in other agricultural roles, while 13-year-old Rhiannon also has to attend school alongside her involvement in the farm. If they had a system requiring them to be on-site every day, Ifan admits they could go months without seeing anybody else.

Rhiannon attends a school in Llanfair Caereinion where most of her classmates live on farms or know family members who farm, but few are quite as interested and invested in agriculture as she is. She takes turns doing all the jobs on the farm, whether it’s selecting which ewes are being kept or moved on or moving the electric fencing around. Ifan says she is going to start turning the hay in 2023 as well. Father and daughter disagree occasionally, especially on small day-to-day matters, but have a common vision for the farm’s future.

“We disagree on little things, but we’re fairly happy with the overall direction and running of things," says Ifan. "I realised we were running the farm together when we got to the stage where no matter what job needed doing, there was always one volunteer, and it was Rhiannon. It’s nice to have somebody to consult and knock ideas about with.”

“I’ve been farming as long as I can remember,” Rhiannon says. “When we moved here, I was just brought up with it. If there were some sheep that needed moving, I’d just go along with it. At school, even in something like geography, most of what we learn about is farming and agriculture.”

Rhiannon says she likes the idea of being a farmer for her career but admits, “There are other things I’d like to do as well”. Ifan is happy for her to continue following her interests and develop the skills that farming provides. “She loves it here,” Ifan says. “She comes home from school, puts her wellies on and goes off with the dogs for an hour or two.”

I think we farm quite unusually, so I want to raise awareness of that and our daily lives on TikTok.

Rhiannon Davies

Rhiannon has started spreading the word about the farm via social media, using TikTok to create videos around Carreg-y-Bîg showing the landscapes and farming style, which within a couple of weeks had gained her a few hundred followers and tens of thousands of views. She hopes this will spark interest in nature-friendly farming with people outside the local communities. “I think we farm quite unusually, so I want to raise awareness of that and our daily lives. Most of my generation is on TikTok, and hopefully, it will help them make better decisions in future,” she says.

Ifan and Rhiannon’s decisions have certainly helped biodiversity. The farm contains around 10 acres of old deciduous mixed woodland, while the highest points of the farm include a peat bog, which supplies every field with water. The double-laid hedges provide habitat for dormice, curlew nest on higher ground and other species seen around the farm include deer, lapwing, red kites, skylarks and an otter which has been spotted in a pool they created.

“We’ve got brilliant places here by not specifically concentrating on one thing and having different habitats," says Ifan. "We have huge numbers of skylarks, and we avoid the area so we don’t disturb them. We created a pool and we’ve seen an otter in it. We’ve got rare mushrooms and orchids. We’ve got buzzards, red kites, lapwing, deer. We’ve planted a lot of hedgerows, and we’ve got scrub coming through now with reduced grazing. We feel that everywhere needs a variety of habitats. We don’t create habitat here; we just allow it.”

For Ifan, nature and their farm’s resilience go together as the right way to produce food on their land. “I don’t want to turn all this over to nature,” he says. “What I want to do is be mindful of it. Every operation has to be done in the best way for nature and economics."