Our organic hill farm (known as Brynmawr) is located in beautiful south-west Shropshire near the Welsh Border. It also lies within the Shropshire Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is a mixed farm, with cattle, sheep and a range of crops grown. (Certified with the Soil Association). The farm also includes the Shropshire Wildlife Trust’s Rhos Fiddle Reserve, a beautiful large expanse of upland moorland, grazed extensively on bilberry and heather with our livestock. We produce traditional breed beef cattle and sheep, including Highland and Hereford cattle, Hill Radnors sheep and Berkshire Pigs.
The cattle and sheep are particularly well adapted to grazing the habitats found on both the farm and the Wildlife Trust reserve. Crops grown include barley and oats, for feeding and littering the animals, as well as potatoes, carrots, leeks and swedes. Many of the vegetables are sold at local farmers markets. The farm is in a Natural England Higher Level Stewardship scheme, a ten-year agreement providing funding to farmers and other land managers who deliver significant environmental benefits on their land. Such environmental management compliments the organic system and includes hedgerow restoration, erection of bird and bat boxes, creation of wetland scrapes from birds such as Lapwing, late cutting of hay meadows to allow plants to flower and set seed and reduced stocking rates of land in the spring to allow ground nesting birds to nest successfully.