Hoping my future is still in farming after Brexit
The latest in our series looking at the lives of young farmers profiles Dafydd Davies, 17. He lives at Penbryncoch Farm, Parc, Bala, Gwynedd. The family farm is a unit of 182 acres plus a challenging mountain farm of 750 acres in Trawsfynydd, a herd of 30 pedigree Welsh Black cattle and 1,150 Welsh Mountain ewes run between the two farms
I’ve just finished my first year of college (studying agriculture at Glynllifon Agriculture College) and will be starting my second year in September. Since I’ve finished college for the summer, I’ve been working on the family farm with my father, catching up with essential jobs such as shearing our flock of sheep and starting on our silage harvest.
To earn some money I’ve started going out shearing with a contractor a few days a week and I’m currently able to shear a little over 100 a day. I hope to gain more shearing work and more experience next year.
Our family farm is a 182-acre hill farm and we run a herd of 30 pedigree Welsh Black cattle which are split into two calving blocks in the autumn and spring. We finish our heifers which we don’t keep as replacement and sell them to our local butcher. The steers are sold as strong store cattle at our local market in Dolgellau.
We also run a flock of 1,150 Welsh Mountain sheep, half of which are put to a terminal ram to produce butcher’s lamb and the other half to breed replacements.
We have just started selling finished lambs at market and we will be selling lambs weekly until December. We try to finish our lambs off on grass to cut feeding costs.
Since I’ve started at Glynllifon College, I have had lots of experiences and opportunities. Over the year I have travelled to different types of farms, plus an educational trip to Holland. It was interesting to see how farmers in other countries use technology to produce food cheaper.
In May the college entered us to compete at the Welsh NSA sheep event in the Young Shepherd Competition, under-21 age group, and I came joint first. Now I will represent Wales in the UK Sheep Event in Malvern next year.
After I finish at Glynllifon, I hope to go and study agriculture at Aberystwyth University and after that I would like to travel to New Zealand to shear sheep and work on farms to gain more knowledge and experience about the industry. After that I hope to come home to work on the family farm and bring new ideas with me on how to improve our business.
Let’s hope that there will still be a bright future for young farmers in the farming industry for years to come. There are a lot of challenges facing young farmers like myself. One thing I see as challenging is trying to persuade my father to take on new ideas to potentially develop our business instead of following the same routine every year.
I’m a firm believer in trying out new ideas. But there are a lot of challenges facing the industry. The uncertainty of lamb, beef and milk prices from week to week makes it hard to plan for the future.
With Brexit casting a shadow over the industry, who knows what will face British farmers after 2020? One thing is certain, we will just have to wait and see and hope for the best.