Tŷ CochFarm shop · BonvilstonFarm shop

The team

Two of us, and the people who make it work.

Nia took the farm on from her parents in 2009 when it was grass and a milk cheque that had stopped; Dafydd came with a butcher's trade from Cowbridge; Megan runs the café; Iolo runs the fields with Nia; and on a Saturday in June there are six teenagers on the strawberry scales.

Nia Thomas, a Welsh woman in her mid-forties with dark hair tied back and a weathered face, in a green waxed jacket and wellingtons, standing in a vegetable field holding a crate of leeks

Nia Thomas

Farmer and the shop. The fields, the box list on Monday night, the café kitchen

Took over the farm from her parents in 2009 when it was two hundred acres of grass and a milk cheque that had stopped, and put forty of them under vegetables because she had grown them at Pencoed college and liked it more than cows. Walks the rows on Monday and writes the box list; runs the café kitchen on the days the chef is off; keeps the seasonal calendar honest. Will tell you a vegetable is not ready rather than sell it.

Dafydd Thomas, a broad Welsh man in his late forties with short greying hair, in a white butcher's coat over a checked shirt, at a wooden block in a farm shop butchery with a leg of lamb

Dafydd Thomas

Farmer and butcher. The flock, the herd, the butchery, the trees

Nia's husband, a butcher at a shop in Cowbridge for twelve years before the farm, who brought the trade with him and built the butchery at the back of the barn in 2013. Runs the four hundred ewes and the Hereford herd, cuts everything on the counter, planted the Christmas trees on the top field in 2012 and cuts them with the people who chose them. Makes the Friday sausages and will not tell you what is in the sage.

  • 180acres behind the shop: vegetables, lambs, a beef herd and the strawberry field
  • 24crops on the seasonal calendar, kept from the clock
  • 6other Vale farms on the shelves, all within twelve miles
  • 4.8average rating

The rest of us, and the paperwork

Megan, Iolo, and four things worth knowing.

Megan Rees, the café

Ran a café in Cowbridge for eight years before the old dairy, and cooks the plate of the day from whatever Nia brings down at eleven. The bara brith is her grandmother's and she will not give it out.

Iolo Price, the fields

Came from the agricultural college at Pencoed in 2016 for a summer and stayed. Runs the rotation, the polytunnel and the box picking on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and knows which carrot rows the badgers like.

The paperwork

Food hygiene rated five in the shop, the butchery and the café; Red Tractor assured for the lamb and beef; LEAF Marque for the vegetables; every animal traceable to its tag, and the movement book is in the office.

Where the money goes

The shop lets the farm sell at a retail price what it used to sell at a wholesale one, and that is what pays three wages that a grass farm could not. The café keeps the shop open in February; the strawberries pay for the tractor.

Red-painted stone and timber barns around a farmyard, one converted into a farm shop with crates of pumpkins outside, fields behind

Tŷ Coch

The red house, since before anyone wrote it down.

Tŷ Coch means the red house, and the barns have been red for as long as there are photographs; Nia's grandfather painted them with the same oxide every ten years and Dafydd still does. The family has farmed here since 1931, milked until 1998, and kept beef and sheep on grass until 2009, when the milk cheque was gone and the choice was to sell or to grow. The grain barn became the shop in 2009, the dairy the café in 2011, the old calf shed the butchery in 2013.

Finding the farm

This week's box, built in a minute, on the step on Thursday.

Small, medium or large with this week's contents listed, eggs, bread and milk if you want them, and the total before you order. By Tuesday noon; collected from Thursday or delivered Thursday and Friday within eight miles, £3.50, free over £30. No subscription.

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