If Cwm Penmachno is to prevail as a thriving agricultural area it will be down to young farmers such as Iwan Jones - a first generation farmer.
Iwan grew up in Penmachno and can’t remember a time when he wasn't either playing or helping out on farms in the valley.
Two years ago he and partner, Gwawr took the tenancy of Carrog, an 80 acre smallholding in the upper reaches of Cwm Penmachno. In a move which is becoming more and more common in the industry, Iwan combines the main farm with another parcel of land nearer the coast and some common land to keep 300 sheep. However, he is hoping to move into keeping a small herd of beef cattle in the coming years.
He also works five days a week to supplement the income from the farm. He says: “I don’t think I could do it without working full time. That’s the main source of income. That’s what I do now, I’m used to it. Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and then do a few jobs at night. I do most of the jobs on a Sunday. I look forward to Tuesdays when we take the lambs to market, that’s my day off really.”
Though the land is almost 300 metres above sea level, Iwan has no issues with the quality: “It’s good land. It’s dry land. I wouldn’t think there’s a lot wrong with the soil here to be honest. There's a lot of gravel and it drains naturally. The first thing we did when we came here was to test the soil everywhere. Every field was low in everything, starved of absolutely everything. It was a priority restoring nutrient levels and liming where we needed to.
“I think that looking after the soil is one of the most important aspects of farming. It’s the base. If you don’t look after the soil, it doesn’t look after the ewes, and they don’t look after the lambs, as a result it’s the most important to get right in farming. If you haven’t got the base right, you might as well forget it.”
Land is one of the major factors in farming. Another is the weather and Iwan has witnessed good and bad in equal measures during his time at Carrog. “In the first year we were lambing here I was going out in the morning in my T Shirt on a motorbike. This year it was totally different. You wouldn’t believe the difference between the two years. I thought this was so easy, everything went right, but our second season was totally different.
“We had about four or five mornings of snow when we were lambing, and all were being lambed outside. Everything that was being born was dying straight away. You couldn’t do anything about it really. In the end we brought the rest of the Welsh mountain ewes in but they were going down with calcium and dying so we had to turn them back out and leave them alone outside. It wasn’t a very easy spring.”
But even the winter isn’t the major spectre on the horizon. When he is asked about possible issues Iwan immediately identifies tree planting. He is not against the trend but pleads for a balanced approach.
He said: ”I’ve got nothing against environmental work. We’ve done a lot of hedgerow work here but I’m not keen on planting trees on farmland to be honest. I think there are different ways to store carbon and not just planting trees on farms. There are some places where trees would be a suitable solution. People have done it on wetlands, especially if it’s very bad with liver fluke and it’s hard to farm it. I have nothing against that, but I’ve seen good land planted with trees and that seems such a waste, especially as we're trying to feed an ever growing population.”