Make a donation

Help fund our work to amplify nature-friendly farming’s benefits to farmers and policymakers across the UK

Policy & Views

Read a variety of articles, including topical blogs, comment pieces on policy developments and updates on key moments in farming.

Campaigns

Catch up with our latest campaigns and find out more about our work.

Farm Practices

Explore information on many aspects of nature-friendly farm practices.

What is the NFFN?

Discover our mission, our vision and the challenge we meet.

Meet The Team

Meet the farmers in our regional steering groups and the staff team at our core

FAQs

Got a question about nature-friendly farming? We've got it covered here

Supporters

We're proud to work with many organisations who support our mission.
Farmer Stories

Rosie Slater - Finding new opportunities for her upland family farm

Wales
Case Study
Farming Champions
Hedgerows
woodland
meadows
uplands

All imagery: Joanne Coates © for the Nature Friendly Farming Network

Rosie Slater has taken on her family farm on the edge of Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales, as a new entrant. She is now finding ways to diversify the farm while making it more environmentally sustainable and regenerative.

When Rosie Slater became frustrated with her career advising large businesses investing in Asia to spend more of their resources mitigating their environmental and social impact, her thoughts turned to Glanmarlais Farm, the 100 acres of land on the edge of the Brecon Beacons (Bannau Brycheiniog) her parents purchased and began running after her dad’s retirement in 1997.

Rather than trying to convince companies to embrace an environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda, Rosie decided the best way to satisfy her concerns around these issues was to do something practical herself and head back to the family farm.

Both Rosie and her parents had taken unlikely routes into farming. Her dad was an economist for the United Nations who spent three decades abroad while nursing a childhood dream of running a farm in Wales. Rosie studied archaeology at a university in the UK and did financial PR and journalism in Hong Kong before running business workshops in Tokyo and Singapore.  She flew the family nest upon her parents’ entry into farming and had never been seriously involved in their venture, but on her return to the UK after 15 years abroad, she found that all her values now aligned with those that had driven her parents to Wales in the first place.

“I had come back with all these ideas about conservation, and unbeknown to me, my parents had been doing this all along,” she said. “They were really keen on doing things the right way for the land, for nature, and for us in terms of nutrition.”

Rosie’s parents raised organic lamb and pork at Glanmarlais while also doing a lot for nature, including planting new woodland to create biodiversity corridors, planting new hedges and splitting large fields into smaller ones, returning it to more of a traditional Welsh farm in appearance. Overall, the farm is made up of around 30 acres of new and ancient woodland and 70 acres of grazing land.

After her dad died, Rosie’s mum had significantly reduced her farming activities, cutting back on livestock numbers, with the grassland only lightly grazed. Now Rosie is trying to figure out what this second chapter of their family’s work at the farm is going to look like.

“My parents farmed during their retirement, so they had pensions and other sources of income to subsidise their activities,” she says. “The challenge now is to get the farm to pay for itself. Figuring this out is a joint project with my mum, who has strong views about the place, and with my four siblings who don’t live here but love it and want it to stay in the family.”

It’s important to have a bit of everything on your farm: young woodlands, semi-ancient woodland, ancient woodland, grazing land, lowland grazing, upland grazing, wildflower meadows. We have wet, marshy fields as well, which are very good for biodiversity.

Rosie Slater

Currently, the farm is home to 21 sheep, which are a mixture of Welsh Blacks and Welsh Whites, and five highland cows, which are on loan to Glanmarlais for the winter from NFFN Cymru Chair Hywel Morgan. With unimproved and semi-improved grassland on the farm as well as rare wildflowers such as mountain pansies, Rosie is hoping expanding livestock numbers using pedigree native breeds will continue enhancing the farm’s ecological legacy while also producing high-quality meat.

“I believe that using grazing animals for land management enhances biodiversity," says Rosie. "I believe woodland management is good, too, and that doing so commercially and in an environmentally sensitive manner is possible through the use of Continuous Cover Forestry principles. Although I don’t subscribe to the idea that the entirety of our farm should be planted with trees."

"I think balance is important, and so is protecting the characteristics of the various habitats on our land such as our rare unimproved acidic and species-rich neutral grasslands, our ancient woodland and our species-rich marshy grassland, called Rhos pasture."

While she continues to build up her knowledge of cattle handling, the site has been diversifying. Glanmarlais is home to a campsite with five pitches in an almost wild set-up and is part of a members-only organisation called the Greener Camping Club. As part of this, Glanmarlais receives a tree from the club for every membership that it sells to its campers, who in turn are then given access to the GCC’s network of campsites around the UK.

The campsite offers a pared-back selection of facilities: the wildflower meadow where the pitches are, a hot shower fed by a heat pump, two compost toilets, a fridge-freezer and a hay barn visitors can use if it’s raining. “It’s a very simple, wholesome camping experience, with the hot shower providing a touch of luxury which our campers really appreciate,” Rosie says. “The campsite also provides a natural market for selling farm produce.”

The campers are currently sold firewood and honey produced in several beehives kept on the farm. Rosie sees timber as an important product for the farm and has been developing her knowledge of continuous cover forestry, where individual trees are felled on a rolling basis, and the canopy is always maintained, rather than being clear-felled, which destroys natural habitats in one swoop. Eventually, she hopes to add meat production to the list of things coming from the farm, which still has its organic status from when her parents were running it.

Nature-friendly farming has a critical role to play in the future. Unless we have good soil, we have nothing. That 10 centimetres of topsoil is what is most important for all of us.

Rosie Slater

Rosie is expecting nature-friendly farming to play a big role in Glanmarlais’ planned expansion. “I’m expecting things to take off in 2024, and the Nature Friendly Farming Network will be a valuable source of information and ideas for things we’ll be doing,” she says. “We went to a recent workshop on water management for soils. It was really interesting to find out the reasons why water is running off our land and how we can prevent that from happening again with animal and grazing management.”

Rosie’s vision is ultimately for the animals at Glanmarlais to do mob grazing with frequent moves between small areas of fields. The farm makes hay and has been selling some while keeping some back to feed the animals over winter. She is keen to see if the cattle on loan this year require supplementary feeding over the winter, while the sheep have been given some extra food due to extreme temperatures last winter but spend all year outside with very few external inputs.

Rosie admits that getting into farming as a new entrant has not been as straightforward as she envisaged when she returned to Wales from Asia, a process perhaps not helped by the fact that she came back just weeks before the first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020.

“It has been challenging,” she says. “There’s a lot to learn and think about, and sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how much there is to know. I thought I’d be able to come to the farm in Wales and find information easily, but nature-friendly land management isn’t mainstream, although it is gaining more traction now. The only farming examples around me are conventional farms, with a few hundred acres and lots of animals.”

Farming is very much a journey of learning and confidence-building. It’s about being comfortable going ahead and taking risks. There’s management and there’s also entrepreneurship. You sometimes have to take a leap and spend money, maybe make mistakes.

Rosie Slater

Despite that, Glanmarlais is continuing to forge its path. For Rosie, the circularity that has emerged in her efforts to date is especially pleasing, such as the sawdust from the firewood production being used for the compost toilets. Meanwhile, the trees Glanmarlais receives from the Greener Camping Club can be used to replace those recently planted but then killed by extreme weather or deer predation. It’s this circularity that she hopes to expand on.

“I have a lot of ideas and ambitions for the farm, but it’s early days still. I hope 2024 will be the year that we implement them.”