Since starting the growing process at Bremenda Isaf in Summer 2024, vegetables have now started appearing on plates across Carmarthenshire – through the public, private and third sector. Many restaurants and cafes now use vegetables picked freshly from Bremenda Isaf and delivered directly to their kitchens. Here’s a list of places that have been using Bremenda Farm vegetables during September and October 2024:
Hooma Hu, Gelli Aur, Wrights Food Emporium, Y Pantri Glas, Llandeilo, Y Pantri Bach, Felindre, Y Sied, Y Barbican, Y Plough, Felingwm, The Warren, Castell Howell – Cash’n’Carry and Wholesale Customers, Cegin Hedyn Community Cafe, Stacey’s Kitchen, Abergwilli, Ele’s Little Kitchen – Mobile catering.
The Story of Bremenda Isaf
We don’t know when the farm was first established, though the name ‘Abermenda’ first appears in 1637 and the village itself goes back at least 1400 years. Many of the old, Welsh field names on the farm – like ‘Cae’r lleiniau’ (or ‘Field of the strips’) and ‘Maesmawr’ (‘Large arable field’) – suggest farming patterns that stretch back into the early Middle Ages. The first person we can link with certainty to the place is one Dafydd Thomas, who appears on record in 1789 as the tenant and who was also a deacon in Capel y Ddôl in the village.
That snapshot of a man’s life takes us back to a rural world that has now faded, where many more people worked the land and there were more work and socialising opportunities locally. Dafydd and those around him would have to all intents and purposes lived all their lives through the medium of Welsh, and lived within a rich culture that celebrated the land, its people and wildlife. This farm along with others throughout rural Carmarthenshire also practised mixed farming, producing foods and crops of all sorts in sustainable, cyclical ways. Memories of those ways – the hard work and the joys – are still with us today, with many only coming to an end within the last few decades in this part of Wales.
The farm has been part of Carmarthenshire’s County Farm estate since the 1970s, one of many such farms that provide an important route into farming for aspiring farmers who might otherwise be unable to get a foot on the ladder. Now, the county council, with support from the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity fund has set apart a portion of the farm to grow fresh vegetables and fruit for schoolchildren and people in care, with scoping exercises currently underway into how the entire farm could become a model holding of mixed, nature-friendly farming.
This would involve once more producing a wide variety of foods from this land and supplying as much of it locally within the county as possible. The nature on this farm, from the shingle banks of the Tywi to the ancient oak trees, is already invaluable. By minimising or eliminating the use of bought-in fertilisers and pesticides and farming in a way that regenerates the soil and nature’s cycles, the farm could become a model of both economic sustainability and natural regeneration for Carmarthenshire as a whole.
