Abi Reader, dairy farmer in Vale of Glamorgan

I'm Abi Reader, I am a farmer from South Wales. On this farm we produce milk for the supermarket Sainsbury's, we also produce beef for them. We're a family farm, I'm a third-generation farmer and this is where my grandfather used to work back in the 1930s.

Farming is changing all the time but as we evolve and as our animals evolve it's about responding to the needs of the new population that has to be able to eat. Climate change is a massive issue for farmers, we're still members of the public so we see and have the same concerns that everybody does but we're also on the coal face of climate change. There's all sorts of things really that we need to be doing and planning and it's just trying to evolve and use it, use the knowledge that's out there to adapt with it.

The agroforestry system we've got here is a short rotation crop system and it will have arable crops in between it. We will be growing this in order to produce a cash crop every one, two, or maybe three years and there are a variety of different trees within the system. So, we've got cherry, willow, aspen, and lime, they're all supporting our British biodiverse habitat and then the arable crop in between, the one that we've chosen is an experimental crop which is called Sida and that will be used to hopefully grow protein which we could feed to our livestock, particularly to our milking cows but also we are looking at turning all of it into biochar as well with the opportunity to help reduce ammonia emissions to enhance the value the slurry that we're going to be putting back on the ground and also to try and improve the amount of organic matter that's in the soil so that our soil will become much better at holding moisture in it.

If we're looking at the Sida crop that we're growing in the alleys between the agroforestry there's a possibility there that we can reduce the amount of protein that we need to buy in. And protein is really important for producing milk, meat and any other type of crop on the farm so being able to build that into the system could be quite valuable and again reduce the amount of money that we're going to have to keep paying out to bring something in that we could otherwise grow here.

It's entirely different to just planting trees. This is going to provide an income so this site here has got tree cuttings in it that are actually less than a year old at the minute. I hope that in two years' time we'll see trees that are, you know,  probably as tall as me and we'll start to be looking at a viable option for a crop, something that we can actually start to develop what we want which is the biochar and also just to see what it looks like, how it's going to shape this landscape for the future generations.

Certainly, without the support of Sida agroforestry and the Woodland Trust, I wouldn't have even gone here because I wouldn't know what I was doing, where to start, or anything like that, and the result is that we've ended up with two hectares of land that we've put a leap of faith on and that I've got a lot of trust in that this is going to offer benefits that could be applicable to other farms in the future and that's the main goal. Working together to try and, to try and meet a universal goal which is food production and a sustainable planet.