About Tregew Farm
When we were shellfish farming in the West Highlands we worked under the old gaelic principle ”Nach Urramach An Cuan” – How Worthy of Honour is the Sea. Wise and respectful it was our watchword ensuring that we fostered more life in the sealoch than we ever took out from it.
Having moved down to Cornwall in 2004 we strive to extend that principle to the land as well.
Tregew Farm is all about regeneration as is our home farm, Castle Dewey on Bodmin Moor. Regeneration of the soil, of habitat, of natural productivity – as well as of employment and community. Local food produced by local people for local people.
Tregew Farm is just 150 acres but it has seven tenants with connections to both land and sea.
Sailors Creek Shellfish are based in the barn and are integral to the entire success of the place. They have generations of heritage in the sail dredging fraternity – all oysters and queen scallops from Falmouth water are dredged under sail as they have been for hundreds of years. This is the most sustainable fishery anywhere in the UK and Europe.
Soul Farm occupy Parc Julian field next to the barn where they grow organic vegetables in amongst our developing orchard of Cornish cider apple trees.
Sailors Creek C.I.C. rent 5 acres of woodland scrub down by the creek where they are cleaning up and restoring the creek itself while also creating a forest garden.
Anna Brunyee grazes her Dexter cattle on the 25 acres of permanent pasture. Dexters are ideal coastal grazers, they will put up with all weathers and with their relatively small size cause no poaching or erosion to the land.
Philip Pryor and family farm the arable land and are embarked on a regenerative path. Half the farm is now going down to a herbal ley/wildflower mix for the next 5 years while the remainder has 4 metre margins around each field. Much of the cultivation is by minimum till methods.
We are particularly proud of The Foodbarn which occupies the western end of the barn. Set up in December 2020 as a covid-safe space ideal for selling local foods and drink it is open every Saturday. Happily the market has flourished, hosting stalls for anything from bread to shellfish to gin and wine.
We ourselves (the ‘we’ being the Lane family, Andrew, Liz, Patrick and Hector), we live at Castle Dewey Farm on Bodmin Moor where we keep Dexter cattle and some rare breed sheep, mostly Borerays. Shortly some of the land will be mob grazed by our neighbour’s Belted Galloways. Mob grazing is a method of mimicking the natural way that cattle would have grazed in the past, in groups protecting each other from predators and moving on quickly so that the grass and herbs has time to properly regenerate while also building up the soil with dung and flattened vegetation.
In the Winter Sam Heard of the famous Heard boatbuilding family stores work boats in the remainder of the barn.
Tregew is a farm deeply connected to artisan crafts of land and sea. Local, durable, meaningful trades and all very much in line with a Regenerated 21st century.
Tree cover and soil health are a big preoccupation for us and we are so very pleased to be working with an able team from Duchy College monitoring carbon sequestration over the next 5 years and assessing the density and diversity of life within the soil.
The Ancient Tree Forum are advising on how best to look after our old oaks, some of which date to the late 1700’s, and we are currently going round the pasture fields marking young oak saplings that have come up after the prolific mast year of 2019. The intention is to protect some of these within the fields and so provide more habitat and better protection for livestock. Further aiding us in this are the wonderful volunteer organisation Plant-One-Cornwall who in November 2021 are planting copses of native saplings along the steep slope of our pasture closest to Sailors Creek.