Fferm Henbant Bach, Tai’n Lôn, Caernarfon
Focus Site Project: Establishing an agroforestry and regenerative agriculture scheme
Project Objectives:
Henbant is a small, ecological based farm in North West Wales. Current pasture is managed holistically but within larger field parcels than the daily livestock requirements. The grazed pasture will be divided into 30 separate units by tree-lanes, some of woody highly palatable species for cattle to browse and some with top and soft fruit. The farm is also in the process of setting up a no-dig, ecologically intensive market garden; here the garden will be divided up with a significant amount of fruit trees and perennial plants. This will combine forest gardening techniques and theories with the requirements of highly productive annual vegetable production.
Within terrestrial landscapes one of the most productive and diverse niches is forest edge. Henbant thus propose to maximise the amount of forest edge, maximising diversity across the whole farm and to grow food crops within this system.
They will aim to change from the current traditional field layout to an agroforestry development by:
- Putting in field-scale vegetable rotation along with agroforestry lanes.
- Plant top and soft fruit lanes amongst both grazing pasture and bio-intensive no-dig market garden to add to the multi-story approach.