page_title: Agriculture in Wales
section_title: Types of farming
hierarchical_section_title: Agriculture in Wales / Types of farming
caption_attribution_description: English: Cows Ahead Cows going to be milked crossing the B4396 near Abercynllaith. (Taken while on Barmouth to Yarmouth cycle ride)
context_page_description: Agriculture in Wales has in the past been a major part of the economy of Wales, a largely rural country that forms part of the United Kingdom. Wales is mountainous and has a mild, wet climate. This results in only a small proportion of the land area being suitable for arable cropping, but grass for the grazing of livestock is present in abundance. As a proportion of the national economy, the importance of agriculture has become much reduced; a high proportion of the population now live in the towns and cities in the south of the country and tourism has become an important form of income in the countryside and on the coast. Arable cropping is limited to the flatter parts and elsewhere dairying and livestock farming predominate.
  Holdings in Wales tend to be small and operated as family farms. Arable crops and horticulture are limited to southeastern Wales, the Welsh Marches, the northeastern part of the country, the coastal fringes and larger river valleys. Eighty percent of the country is classified as being in a "Less favoured area". Dairying takes place on improved pasture in lowland areas and beef cattle and sheep are grazed on the uplands and more marginal land.
context_section_description: Arable crops grown in Wales include wheat, barley, rapeseed oil and maize for fodder. New potatoes from the Gower peninsula and Pembrokeshire are available early in the season. Horticulture is in long-term decline, with the area of land under cultivation for potatoes, vegetables, soft fruit and orchards having halved since the 1960s to about 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres). In general, Wales produces only about 20% of the horticultural produce eaten in the country.
  Organic farming now covers more than 35,000 hectares (86,000 acres) of Wales. The horticultural products most grown organically include potatoes, brassicas and salad crops. Welsh organic milk is marketed as well as organic cheeses and yoghurts. 
  Dairying is only economic in Wales with a sufficiently large herd in a productive lowland area. Hand-milking a few cows in a byre is a thing of the past and nowadays herds are milked by machine in modern parlours, two or three times a day. The milk passes by pipeline to the cooler and is stored in a refrigerated bulk tank and collected by milk tanker daily. In general, the cows graze outdoors in summer and spend their winter under cover, often in cubicles, the bulk of their feed being silage. Milk prices barely cover the costs of production, margins are tight, and there are fewer family-run dairy farms each year. In 2014, there were 1855 milk-producers in Wales, an annual decline of 1.23% since 2011, but the number of cows milked was nearly static at 223,000.
  Lowland livestock farms concentrate largely on beef cattle and various breeds of sheep, but there are also small units producing rarer animals including goats, deer, alpaca, guanaco, llama, buffalo and ostrich, as well as specialised pig and poultry farms. Most cattle are now housed in winter with their main feed being silage. Systems adopted include suckler cows, where the calf is reared by its mother, and the buying in, and growing on, of young beef cattle. Some of these are crossbred calves, a by-product of the dairy industry, where the dairy cow is put to a Charolais, Limousin, Angus, Hereford or similar beef bull. Many of these "stores" are later sold to other parts of the United Kingdom for fattening. The beef sector in Wales is in slow decline, with some 220,000 cattle over two years in Wales in 2011.
  Upland and hill farms provide grazing for hardy breeds of cattle like Welsh Blacks and for Welsh Mountain sheep. The cattle are normally housed in winter and may graze the open hillside in summer. The trampling of their hooves helps control bracken and they feed on a wide range of vegetation and on coarse tufts of grass that sheep cannot tackle. The sheep are mostly "hefted" on the unfenced open hillside all year round. Here they know their way around, know where to graze at different times of year and where to shelter. The male lambs are used for meat and most of the females are retained on the hill as flock replacements. Aged ewes are moved to lower elevations and crossed with lowland rams to produce Welsh mule ewes, which are then used for breeding.
caption: Cows about to be milked near Abercynllaith, Powys
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