The Pontbren Project is a farmer led approach to sustainable land management in the uplands and was first recognized in 1997 when planting on 3 farms occurred and then form there the project has improved, for example in 2001 a group of neighboring farmers formed a group to make the project bigger and in 2003 they were Enfys funded to help towards hedging and planting making shelters for their livestock. Then in 2003-20012 the project has become Welsh government funded mainly helping the farmers understand the value of destocking.
As Dr Sophie explained as an active member in making this project become a success she had to understand the points of view of the farmers and also follow the guidelines given by the welsh government, and as she stated the farmers themselves decided where plantation would happen on their land as they knew where it would work best. It was also said that the panel to the project just give the group of framers the funded money and let them as neighbors audit each other which she said was a great success.
The main Aspects of this project where that it was led by the farmers as they knew what would work best according to their style of farming and land layout, another aspect would be that stock reduction is key for them to have healthy more valuable stock as well as restoring shelters and habitats to give the stock somewhere to take shelter. It also added value to wood products as some farmers just reinstated woodland management to areas that they don’t use anymore to allow the area to recover.
Another Aspect was meat marketing which basically goes with the destocking theory that meat would be healthier and more valuable and Sophie stated that even though they failed to gain a supermarket contract some farmers said that they preferred it this was as less stock meant less stress on the land making it healthier and less stress on the farmer as he had to do less work so overall it still was a mild success and the last main aspect was business monitoring which means it made it easy for the farmers to monitor their farm as a business which made it easy to see whether the project was a success
Dr. Wynne-jones stated that even with some difficulties the project was a success and is used as an example to other farms and she also ensured we knew that the farmers were always aware with every step took in the project even the write up so their views weren’t misunderstood and that she had difficulty at first to understand whether she was evaluating the farmers or evaluating with the farmers.
This seminar i found really interesting the way you have to constantly think about different aspects of the project and made it clear when doing a project like this you have to take both sides into consideration and not hold judgment before entering the project. I Found Dr. Sophie Wynne-Jones a very interesting lecturer and she has made me wonder if i would like to go into that line of work in the future.
zoologylad 
A really nice summary of the talk, but hard to follow with so little punctuation. Her talk was very interesting. Have you heard much about the current agroenvironmental schemes? Most of them state that a certain percentage of the land must be grown “environmentally” or the farmer won’t get certain subsidies. Most of the time these schemes don’t take the farmers opinion into account, and so they are forced to plant hedges, woods and crops in areas that simply aren’t suitable for them. Unsurprisingly this rarely works and only serves to make the farmers dislike the policy makers more intensely. I hope you can see, from this talk, how communication, and giving the power back to the farmer can actually grately improve the results and the attitudes of both sides towards each other. I hope Sophie can help get this kind of scheme implemented across the country.
I didn’t attend this seminar so was nice to read about the different points of view, I think it was good that the project worked alongside the farmers instead of trying to control where plantings took place, and its probably the reason it worked so well. Its a little disappointing that they didn’t manage to get a contract but sounds like they learnt a lot from the experience anyway.
A few pictures would have been nice just to break down the writing a bit but apart from that it was a nice summary to read 🙂
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This is a seminar that I wasn’t able to attend. However, I can see from your post what i missed. You relay the information given very well and I feel like I am not missing any important information.
I find this post a little hard to follow with just the blocks of text. if the text was split into smaller sections and broken up by photos, quotes or even videos it would have captured my attention a lot more. I feel a wall of text may overwhelm some people and they would simply skip over this post.
Other than that a great overview of the seminar. It would be great to hear an overview at the end including your opinion on the matter at hand.
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