Farmers sell top lifestyle in bold new chapter of their history
Tom Homfray left his legal career in the City to come home and take on the 2,500-acre Penllyn Estate and its new farm shop alongside his teacher wife Katherine. But the story of Forage Farm, on the outskirts of Cowbridge, goes back generations. Laura Clem
THE story of Forage Farm shop and the Homfray family who own it is one that could easily be turned into a historical drama.
The plot would span 300 years – beginning with the founding of one of Wales’ great iron dynasties, featuring a marriage to the richest man in the world, a castle, a three-decade wait to build a roundabout, shrewd property deals, a pandemic, and ending with poached egg and avocado on sourdough toast in the farm shop café.
Wales has changed beyond recognition in those three centuries but one thing has remained the same throughout – the Homfrays have been constantly striving to modernise and improve not just their lot, but those around them too.
We visit on a Thursday – it’s not even 11am and already the bright and airy café at Forage Farm Shop is alive with the clink of coffee cups, the gentle hum of chatter, and the clatter of pans in the kitchen. The April sun is streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows which look out over the River Thaw and the Homfray-owned 2,500-acre Penllyn Estate on the outskirts of Cowbridge.
The scene is every inch modern café culture, but don’t be fooled by this idyllic scene.
“We were a bit naive,” said owner Tom Homfray about the chaotic early days of the shop. It was due to open in 2020 in the same week the pandemic hit the UK. Tom and his wife, Katherine,
were still living in London at that point and had planned to move to Wales at the same time.
Already struggling to get to grips with overheads and costs, the pandemic was another hurdle to overcome – although the scene in the capital was very different from Wales.
“In London the supermarket shelves were empty,” said Katherine. “But here they were still choosing cutlery.” Until March 2020 Tom and Katherine, both 38, had been living in London, where Tom was a development lawyer and Katherine was a teacher. But the Penllyn Estate was where Tom grew up alongside his brother, Matt, and sister, Ginny.
All three siblings went their separate ways to study and start a new life off-farm. Tom was a lawyer for 11 years but always planned to come back home to south Wales.
He has childhood memories of the farm sheds being full of cows, and running down the centre of the bull line with his brother for a dare.
“When I left the city law firm they all said: ‘You’re going to be so bored’,” he said.
But so far it’s proved the opposite – he’s busier than he’s ever been and yet he’d not change it for the world. It’s stress, but in a different way.
Tom said: “It’s very empowering. I would never go back now.”
His older brother, Matt, who married and moved away, has also returned to run the butchery side of the Forage Farm Shop. It’s clear in the way Tom speaks that he’s driven by something that runs deeper than simply creating a profitable business – it has to be sustainable too and he has to earn his stripes. He’s acutely aware that he’s come back to farm and doesn’t have the years of experience that many of the estate staff have. That’s why he studied an MA in agriculture, he said.
“We had talked for a long time about opening a farm shop,” said Katherine.
The couple’s three children – all under the age of eight – have revelled in their new life on the farm and are no strangers to the café, where they pop up for hot chocolates.
“I was intimidated about coming back here,” continued Tom. “[The farm staff] had 200 years’ experience between them and a guy comes back from London to run the estate.”
The bulk of that experience is in the form of his 70-year-old father, John Homfray, a well-respected man in agricultural circles regarded as being at the forefront of diversification and innovation. John Homfray had already set about establishing the Penllyn Estate as a model for diversification. From a 1,000-cattle rearing unit to trying out Wagyu beef as the “golden ticket”, the Penllyn Estate has always had livestock, but the biggest part had been growing crops. Because of the success of the farm shop they have finally been able to bring livestock back to the farm, including 24,000 free-range hens, a flock of Welsh lamb, native- breed beef, and pigs for their home-reared pedigree Welsh pork.
There’s a truffle plantation too, a collection of simple cabins for holiday accommodation, a firewood business, and even an ice-cream parlour where Welsh company Fablas make their popular ice creams. In all there are around 40 tenant and commercial rents as well as a waste recycling centre, which takes much of the waste from the Vale of Glamorgan Council.
Plans for the farm shop café, and indeed everything else that Forage has since developed, have been in
incubation since 1989, when it was Tom’s grandfather, Frank, who had the vision.
“Farm shops are very en vogue,” continued Tom, who modelled his ideas on what he saw in England.
“The ones in places like Shropshire are very much grander and bankrolled by landed estate with deep pockets. We are trying to run a sustainable business.”
It was Frank who always wanted a farm shop, said Tom, but building an access road was nigh on impossible – back then the only way into the farm was off a steep road off the main road which was deemed too dangerous.
“We needed to get planning consent for the farm shop and access road,” said Tom.
Things gained traction in 2015, when the Vale of Glamorgan Council started looking at ways to expand Cowbridge, he explained. His father sold a 100-acre plot to Taylor Wimpey for an undisclosed sum and that money went straight into developing the plans for a farm shop and café. The deal came with a new access off the newly built roundabout on the A48 between Cardiff and Bridgend with direct access to the farm.
It’s taken a “multi-million-pound investment” to get to this point and it would’ve been impossible without selling off that parcel of land. The family are aware that might look like selling their soul, but actually that shrewd move has not only opened up a whole range of new possibilities, but given a real boost to the local economy. It’s obvious the latter is a real driving factor for Tom.
“Dad has always put a lot of money back into the local economy,” Tom said.
Even so he had to defend the decision to some people locally, which he did stoically, and argued: “If you did that deal and have that capital investment into the farm you use it to start the business which could be the catalyst for the local economy.”
The farm used to employ 11 people. These days it employs anywhere between 55 and 70.
Looking around the shiny and modern restaurant and shop, with its bleached wood-cladded exterior and glass, Forage has elevated the typical farm shop into something much sexier. Everything on display, whether it’s the mouth-watering cakes under the glass cloches or the neatly chopped logs stacked against the wall near the log burner, looks like it’s straight out of a lifestyle magazine.
The ethos of the business is very much “farm to fork”, said Tom earnestly, forever peppering his conversation with all the buzzwords like “whole-carcass model” and “regenerative farming methods”. It’s about providing a quality experience to the customer – beginning with serving produce of the highest environmental and ethical standards.
“The butchery has to be on point,” said Tom. “We’re trying to make it so our butchery is always outstanding.”
Part of its success is actually down to the pandemic itself – when butchers on the high street closed people turned to Forage, who’d decided to stay open out of necessity as much as anything. Those customers have stayed.
“We started an online shop pretty much overnight,” said Tom, saying that was all Katherine’s doing.
That first week was total chaos. And yet there was a “real appetite” for their produce.
“We had 65 pick-ups in the car park, it was chaos,” Tom continued. “We bought a pair of walkie-talkies and were walking around the car park reading registration numbers through to the shop. The chef was playing trance music just to keep himself going.”
Having not been a business for long enough they didn’t qualify for furlough and kept the five staff members on throughout, paying them out of their own pockets for the first few months.
“It was pretty scary,” admitted Tom. And yet there was no greater seal of approval for what they were doing than when the Welsh rugby team rocked up and Wayne Pivac brought his family for a celebratory lunch after winning the Six Nations last year.
Tom allowed himself a small smile about the Welsh rugby team visit, but he’s hard on himself and rarely stops to allow himself a pat on the back.
He chooses to sit facing the restaurant during our chat so he can keep half an eye on what’s happening around him. Nearly every answer he gives comes back round to the ethos of the business, ideas of sustainability, regenerative farming, and farming margins, not yield. There’s no doubt Tom is the technical side of the farming business.
Just like the Homfrays who’ve come before him he’s constantly pushing the boundaries, looking for the next opportunity. The family’s history is displayed on the wall in the café and it’s an esteemed history – one of the great “iron dynasties” that helped turn Wales into an industrial centre of world-class proportions.
The Homfray story in Wales started with Francis Homfray – a man who arguably proved influential in creating modern Wales. Originally from the Midlands, Francis arrived in Wales in the autumn of 1782 and created a mill, foundry, and several forges in the town of Merthyr. He had two sons, Jeremiah and Samuel, and after much arguing between themselves they eventually went their separate ways – but not before setting up the Penydarren Ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil and trialling the first railway steam locomotive built by Richard Trevithick.
Jeremiah was knighted by King George III for services to his country, but a few years later was declared bankrupt and fled to Boulogne to avoid paying his creditors. Meanwhile his son John married Ann Maria, who was daughter to the agent of the Marquess of Bute, reportedly the richest man in the world at the time.
John Homfray purchased Penllyn Castle Estate in 1846 for £18,000. The castle itself is now privately owned.
Today the estate remains in ownership of the Homfray family, direct descendants of Sir Francis Homfray, and Tom and Matt are the latest generation to run the show alongside their own families. That family history is something Tom carries as a great responsibility. Perhaps it makes him even more determined to prove that his generation is more than capable of driving things forward.
“It’s about having a lot of fun on the way,” he said. “And trying to hand over the estate in a better way than when we took it on – like my dad did for us.”