Farmers Weekly Awards 2024: Beef Farmer of the Year

Dylan Jones of Castellior, Menai Bridge, Anglesey, is Farmers Weekly‘s 2024 Beef Farmer of the Year.

Dylan is an exceptional example of how setting a goal, sticking to the plan, and having the ambition and resolve to make it succeed can transform a beef farming business.

Up until 2016, Dylan and his father, Wyn, were finishing 700 cattle a year, lambing 900 sheep and purchasing all feed apart from the 51ha of barley grown on the farm.

See also: Farmers Weekly Awards 2024: Beef Farmer of the Year finalists

When a group of visiting farmers questioned whether that intensive system could ever reach net zero, the challenge was set.

“It struck a chord with me, I was aware of the growing negative backlash towards beef farming,’’ he recalls.

“We were buying a lot of urea, a lot of nitrogen [N] and feeding soya.’’

Cost calculations

Dylan made a plan, did the costings and calculated how many cattle he would need to finish annually to make the whole thing stack up financially.

Within four months, the sheep had been sold and he got to work on overhauling the farming system.

To make it work, he needed a “mountain of manure’’. “I needed manure in the system so that meant plenty of cattle and plenty of straw bedding.

“Manure is very important, so we take the same care in looking after it as we do with our stock.

“I am a big fan of putting a lot of straw down: it is my foundation for the next crop, and clean cattle are happy cattle.’’

His father had questioned if it was possible to grow barley without N, but with the manure at their disposal they are producing consistently high yields in a rotation following red clover and with 37t/ha of manure applied.

Red clover has proven to be the Joneses’ most useful tool in the shift away from purchased inputs.

“Red clover has been massive in all of this,’’ says Dylan.

“It’s a witch’s tale to say that you can’t plant red clover after red clover, we’ve been doing it for years with break crops in between and it works really well.’’

Although the breeding ewes were sold, Dylan saw a need to have sheep in the system as a grassland management tool, so he buys up to 600 Texel mule ewe lambs a year.

These are shorn in October and again in May before they are sold; the wool is used as cattle bedding and incorporated into the soil with the manure when fields are cultivated. 

Shearing is the only job that is outsourced, with all other farm work is done in-house.

Remarkable achievements

Despite his remarkable achievements, Dylan continues in his mission to capture marginal gains, but he is nonetheless satisfied that he has met the challenge set by that group of visitors in 2016.

Project work with Farming Connect estimates that the net carbon footprint of the business is 3.9kg carbon dioxide equivalent/kg beef liveweight, which is considerably lower than the national average in Wales.

“We are much more intensive than we were, but we are much more environmentally friendly than we were and that’s where we need to be,’’ says Dylan.