Pembrokeshire Back to the Land with Kate Humble

In Britain's beautiful landscapes,

traditional farming is battling to survive.

Making a living here has its challenges,

but those challenges are being met head-on

with invention, energy and passion.

A new breed of trailblazing entrepreneurs

are turning back to the land

to reinvent old trades and set up modern rural businesses.

Latest figures show that as many as 100,000 people

are leaving our cities and moving to the countryside every year.

I've seen first-hand,

having started my own rural business in Monmouthshire,

the grit and determination needed to take that leap.

And joining me is award-winning organic restaurateur

Geetie Singh-Watson, who'll bring her knowledge and passion.

I am really, really impressed.

We're going to be meeting some of the modern countryside pioneers...

Come on!

..whose love, skill and tenacity

are at the heart of this rural revolution.

Woo-ha!

This is a passion. I'm doing it because I believe in the product.

WHISTLE

Every region and every season present new challenges,

and tonight, we're in Pembrokeshire,

following six innovative businesses through spring,

summer and autumn as they take on big investments...

-You really need to believe in this.

-It better be right!

..against all odds...

-It's pretty risky.

-Yes.

-I like a little gamble.

..doing their bit to reinvigorate our great British countryside.

We wanted something that would keep us going on the farm.

We had no idea what we had stumbled onto.

SEABIRDS CALL

It's hard not to come here and be blown away by

this dramatic shoreline.

It is Britain's only coastal national park.

But it's wild, rugged,

and remote, and making a living here can be a challenge.

It's spring, and I'm heading out towards Fishguard

in North Pembrokeshire.

To a 700-acre dairy farm

where one enterprising farmer is diversifying

the family business to generate a new income.

Despite the fact that most of us start our mornings

with milk in our tea and butter on our toast,

the dairy industry in Britain is in crisis.

70% of dairy farms in Wales have already closed

and one in five are expected to close this year.

Projecting the downturn, third-generation dairy farmer Will

has taken a brave leap to breed Japanese cattle called Wagyu.

He's hooked into the growing food trend for Wagyu steak,

selling his meat to high-end restaurants

and stores across the UK.

MOOING

These are nice quiet beasts, aren't they?

-Kate, nice to see you.

-How do you do? Will Pritchard.

Very, very good to see you. So youngsters here.

Yeah, they are. These are about 15 months.

-15 months!

-These are about 15 months of age, yeah.

I don't want to be rude, Will, but they seem very tiny for beef cattle.

Because usually, when you see beef cattle in a field, they are big,

muscular, chunky things, the Limousins, the Charolais.

Yeah, they're a very special breed, the Wagyu.

The value in the meat is actually from the marbling,

which is the intramuscular fat that you get in your steaks.

This marbling is what gives Wagyu

a distinctive melt-in-the-mouth flavour.

But to get a Japanese breed of cattle

grazing on a Pembrokeshire farm isn't simple.

We have four or five heifers in Australia that are some of

the best-quality cattle money can buy over there.

You can't buy the bull. But you can buy some of the semen from the bull

and to be able to buy the very best cattle in the world at the moment

is costing us around about £1,500 for one dose of semen.

Wow! OK.

'That's currently the most expensive bull sperm in the world.'

And then you'll do artificial insemination on the cows here?

-In Australia.

-Oh, in Australia?

And we will bring the embryos back

and then implant them in our cattle here in the UK.

-Really?

-And they'll be born here as Welsh cattle.

But it's a hell of a process.

I mean, very scientific. You're not leaving anything to chance.

And it's a long-term investment as well.

The investment in those genetics made today,

that meat won't be on the plate for maybe six to seven years.

So you really need to believe in this?

It better be right!

He says, nervously!

Come on, come on.

'So far, they've invested half a million pounds into the venture.'

Go on, don't look at me like that!

-Through the gate, up on the left?

-Yeah, up on the left, Kate.

'Will's Wagyu are grass-fed.'

I'll get round the back of these ones, Will. Come on, girls.

'Which should give their meat a sharper, beefier taste.'

Me and the scrappy one, bringing up the rear.

There's always one at the back, Kate, yes!

Oh, look at that. Feasting.

Yeah, this is one of my favourite, favourite jobs, really,

moving cattle from one paddock into the next.

And on that note, can we go and eat some?

Don't tell the cattle!

Will's steaks can sell for up to £50 a kilo,

compared to just £30 a kilo for standard beef.

This would be a Wagyu ribeye steak.

You can see the marbling coming through in the meat.

Now, you see, I have to say, because I'm not used to that,

I would look at that and go,

"Ooh, it looks sort of fatty and unappealing, to be honest."

Yeah, well, here's an interesting...

Here's a piece of steak from a commercial supermarkets.

As you can see, that's what I think the consumer

has been sort of trained to want to purchase - no fat whatsoever.

-Yeah.

-The fat you're getting in Wagyu is a polyunsaturated fat.

-It's a healthy fat.

-It is. It's good meat to eat.

So can we do a bit of a taste test?

Yeah, yeah. We'll give it a go.

Don't you just love a barbecue in Pembrokeshire?

It's really, really, really good!

How have you gone about marketing this?

There actually is quite a recognition for Wagyu beef

in the country and certainly where we are selling most of our meat

-is London.

-Right.

-It's naturally growing in popularity.

-Yeah.

-And the best advert we can give it is to get people to try it

so we do quite a bit of tasting when we go to London.

Garnish and everything! Look at that. OK.

So we've got... That's our supermarket.

-Yeah.

-That's our premium ribeye.

-And that's the Wagyu.

-That's the Wagyu.

I'll do the honours.

'It's only in the last 12 months

'that they've been able to guarantee to slaughter two animals a week

'and sell them to a major retailer.'

Well, let's try that one first.

It tastes all right. And this one.

That's a grainier texture.

-Yeah.

-More flavour.

The moment of truth.

Oh, my God!

It's extraordinary.

It's got a softness and sweetness to the meat

that neither of the other two have.

It's a completely different eating experience.

Is that what people say?

It's very, very, very good.

I take it we are going to finish the Wagyu ribeye off?

I don't think there's going to be any "we" about it!

Yeah, this one's for me!

Will is taking quite a risk.

To rear calves that he hopes

in a few years' time will produce top quality beef

for a pretty niche market.

They say that fortune favours the brave, and he is certainly brave.

But will that be enough to save his family farm?

And it won't be until this year's calves are born in the autumn

that we find out if Will's big investment is starting to pay off.

Geetie Singh-Watson set up the UK's first organic gastro pub

in her twenties, so knows all too well

the challenges of running a company based on new ways of working.

She's heading just over the border to Llanboidy,

a small village nestled in the South Welsh hills,

where from a caravan in his mum's back garden...

..one rookie chocolatier has blended the region's organic milk

with cocoa from Madagascar.

I'm intrigued to see in this sparse coastal landscape of Pembrokeshire

how a chocolate company is going to find its way into the market.

Nom Nom is headed up by 23-year-old Liam with a 14-strong team...

..who hand-make and wrap over 5,000 bars a week.

-Hello.

-Nice to meet you. I'm Liam.

-Great to meet you. Look at this place.

-Welcome to the cow shed.

It's extraordinary. It's like kind of San Francisco

in the middle of the Welsh hills.

-In Llanboidy!

-It's wonderful.

So this used to be home to about 60 cows.

And now it's home to 14 chocolate-making rascals.

So over what period have you gone from

-just you in a caravan to 14 people here?

-Three years.

-That's incredible.

-Yeah.

-How precarious are you?

Cos that is rapid expansion and that's quite dangerous, isn't it?

Constantly precarious. No,

I don't know how we've managed it, but it's going really well.

We just keep on making the chocolate bars.

I want to look around this amazing place.

Every year, 160 16- to 24-year-olds leave Wales and move to England.

So over here, they're wrapping.

All the team that work here are under 25 and want to stay.

This is where all the figures happen.

-This is the office.

-Excellent.

And then this is my mum. Hello.

Mum wrapped the first 50,000 chocolate bars.

What do you turn over?

So we went from a £3,000 loan

to half a million in, like, three years,

which is quite a lot of chocolate bars.

So this is the chocolate room.

Oh, this looks amazing.

-Do I get to have a go?

-I reckon you should definitely have a go.

Last year alone in the UK, we spent over £3 billion on chocolate.

You must have invested a hell of a lot in this building.

These machines cost about £10,000, these tempering machines.

They keep the cocoa butter crystals at the right kind of formation

so it gets that shine and the snap.

Making chocolate by hand like this is a labour-intensive process.

-Don't be scared.

-No, I'm not.

It will be fine.

One person makes three bars every minute.

-Tip it like that.

-Tip it like that.

This is our super salted caramel.

It's about 25% butter.

-Nice.

-Very good butter from Calon Wen.

Well, the butter bit's good. It's the sugar bit that's bad, isn't it?

Well... We don't talk about sugar being bad here.

-Do we not?

-Sugar is very good!

We like sugar a lot!

Can I have a go? And are you using organic butter?

So this is Calon Wen organic, so it's a local co-operative.

The dairy got shut down but they got together a load of farmers

and they rebuilt the daily.

One of my big motives with setting up the pub,

it was absolutely a prime motive

was that I wanted to buy directly off farmers

who were doing really interesting things.

Currently, they have ten chocolate varieties on the go,

two of them changing every four months,

seasonally inspired by the local produce.

At the moment, we're working on vodka and raspberry bar,

so these are fresh organic raspberries from Roz the raspberry

-in Hay on Wye.

-Nice.

So we're going to put that with some beautiful Welsh vodka

from the Penderyn distillery.

BELL CLANGS

And strong ethical values

are also at the heart of how the company is run.

Do you all eat, have lunch together every day?

I think it's very important.

It's a good time to communicate with everyone.

We review everything that happens in our day, if we had any problems,

how we can stop that from happening next time.

The fact that you've set it as part of your culture

will mean that you'll always engage with it.

It's really extraordinary.

I am really, really impressed.

Our mission is certainly to be able to say, "Well, no, actually, like, you can stay.

"There are these opportunities and we can build these great places

"and employ all of these people in an ex-dairy farming community

"which has kind of been ripped away."

Where did you grow up?

Tenby, Pembrokeshire.

Liam is hoping to expand his business

and its values on a much bigger scale.

I like that old Dutch barn.

This is the weirdest place.

In the next six months,

they plan to move into this abandoned farm

and set up a community of young makers and producers.

How much have you got to spend here?

So we're talking about raising £1 million in the next two years.

Is this going to risk Nom Nom, moving your business in this way?

Absolutely, yeah. It could. You know, in six months' time,

we might be having a very different conversation.

Well, I really hope not.

Me too!

Nom Nom is a fascinating business,

and Liam's running it in a really innovative way,

supporting local people in rural Pembrokeshire.

Expansion is a risky time,

and I really hope it works out well for him.

It will be fascinating to see what progress they make

over the coming months.

I'm heading to the heart of the region,

to the Eastern shore of the Cleddau estuary, where five years ago,

Annette and Nick set up 50 hives in this ancient woodland

hoping to make a new life for their family in a place they love.

Many people, myself included,

have started keeping bees

in an effort to boost honeybee populations.

But can beekeeping really be a viable business?

As a nation, we eat 25,000 tonnes of honey a year

but just 1,500 tonnes of that comes from British hives.

Nick and Annette currently have 90 hives,

producing an average of three and a half tonnes of honey,

and in the winter months,

they make over 4,000 jars of citrus fruit marmalade.

-Hi, Nick.

-Hello.

Not very clever beekeeping weather, is it?

No, it's a little bit wet.

Oh, they won't like it very much.

Hello, girls.

You could try a little bit of honey, if you like.

I'd love to.

Thank you. Sorry, girls.

Wow! That's so floral, isn't it?

Incredibly fresh, as well.

Incredibly fresh!

When will you start harvesting, do you think,

or does it absolutely depend on the weather?

So, typically, we take the bulk of the honey off at the end of July.

But you're at the mercy of...

Yeah, and so it's blended by the bees through the season.

-Well, that's not bad.

-Which is why it tastes different every year.

A good crop is totally reliant on the weather,

which means honey producing is a risky business.

To boost the yearly income,

Nick has capitalised on another of his skills.

He breeds and sells over 400 queens each season.

So this is a breeder hive there.

-Right.

-This queen, she was born in 2013

-and I bred from her last year as well.

-Yeah.

So it really is like having a great breeding bitch, for a dog,

getting good puppies. I mean, you get a queen

with the characteristics that you're absolutely looking for

and they become your sort of main breeding female.

Absolutely. We are looking to take larvae

when it's about 24 hours old, which is about two millimetres long.

Crikey, Nick! It's an incredibly intricate operation.

'Selling queens to other honey beekeepers

'can pull in over £6,000 a year.'

We'll take it indoors.

-OK.

-And we can sit inside in the dry and graft some queen cells.

OK.

Gosh, it's a hive of activity in here. Hello!

'Nick, Annette, and their daughters do everything they can

'to secure the life they've built for themselves here

'by making marmalade to supplement the honey income.'

-So it's a real family business.

-It is, yeah.

When was it that you decided that bees were going to be the thing

that were able to keep you here and keep your lovely family?

I guess there came a stage when we thought,

it's a beautiful place to live and we could manage to grow the business

-and...

-We could employ friends.

-Yeah.

-Family.

To be able to live from this area is quite unusual, you know.

There are so few things that you can survive doing.

And I knew nothing of bees, or about bees, but I've learnt an awful lot.

It was watching his father tending the family hives where Nick mastered

his traditional beekeeping skills,

and the intricate process of breeding queens.

So these are some wax cell cups which we made and we're going to

graft the 24-hour-old larvae into the bottom of each of these cups.

I'm fascinated by this.

'Nick can sell the larvae at two stages.'

-See the larvae on the end there?

-There it is! Yeah!

'Once successfully transferred, and fed for seven days in the hive,

'they can fetch £10 each.'

Shall I have a go and see if I can...?

-Would you like to?

-Yeah.

It's almost when it's too small to see,

-then it's the right size to graft.

-OK.

It's really, really difficult.

-It is a trick, isn't it?

-Yeah.

I think I've annihilated it.

I've murdered a future queen of England and Wales!

'Left to grow into a fully fledged mated queen,

'this larva could be worth £55.'

And why do people want to buy queens?

-What's the market?

-If you're wanting to produce lots of honey,

it becomes necessary sometimes to replace an old or failing queen.

-Right.

-And we can post queens and send them by Royal Mail

-all over the British Isles.

-How very appropriate!

-Yeah!

Relying on honey for your income is precarious.

The weather has a direct impact on bees and on honey production

and as we all know, we can't control the weather.

But if Pembrokeshire doesn't give them a good summer,

there could be lean times ahead.

Summer has arrived on the Welsh coast,

along with the region's four million visiting tourists.

I'm taking a trip out to Freshwater West on the wild Atlantic sea.

The fishing industry here today is worth £8 million

to the county's economy and this beach is a well-known spot

for catching fish such as bass and pollock.

But this coast provided another valuable resource - seaweed.

For centuries, it was harvested and eaten,

but then that tradition was lost until recently.

Now, it's seeing something of a resurgence

with a whole new generation of rural entrepreneurs picking it,

processing it, and selling it.

Four years ago, Jonathan walked out on his office job

with £2,000 and a dream he could build a business

from this shoreline's many riches.

He now picks local seaweed that he sells in his gourmet beach shack

and produces seven varieties of dried seaweed-inspired products,

stocked in over 600 retailers globally.

But most days still start here on the beach at five in the morning.

Good morning!

-Good morning, how are you doing?

-Good, thank you.

Wow! What a beautiful place.

It's gorgeous, isn't it? I love it down here.

What are you picking this morning?

Basically, I'm picking this kind of black

kind of thin film we call laver seaweed.

This is the delicacy of Wales.

Laver bread is the sort of staple, isn't it,

of every good Welsh breakfast?

Yes. Basically, you boil that for about ten to 12 hours,

you mince it and it goes a lovely kind of greeney-blacky...

I won't say lovely, because it doesn't look the best.

And it's been used for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Laver bread gets its name from the bread-like kneading process,

which gives it a mashed-up spinach consistency.

-Is your whole business dependent on this seaweed?

-Yes, yes.

-So...

-So it's pretty risky.

-Yes.

-I like a little gamble.

-You grew up in Pembrokeshire, didn't you?

-Yeah, yeah.

But you didn't grow up and then say,

"Right, I'm going to make a business out of laver seaweed"?

No. I did a lot of travelling.

And ended up in Swindon.

Got a proper job. Straight into that kind of nine to five.

You're sitting there on a sunny day, inside, and you're thinking,

you know, this is not for me.

I remember I had one particularly bad day.

Just going back home to the flat, and going, "I need to sort this out.

"Write down everything you love in life."

You know, and the top three was Pembrokeshire -

there's food, beach and family - and, you know, it was obvious then.

If you could build a business around those things,

then you're onto a winner.

His decision was bang on trend.

Seaweed's superfood properties

have meant 125% growth in UK sales last year.

-Oh, that's nice. The sun's just come up.

-I know.

Now, getting up at 4.30 in the morning

-and coming down here is no hardship.

-Yeah, it's lovely.

It's beautiful. In the winter,

-I can imagine it's absolutely brutal.

-No, stunning!

I love it in the winter.

In the winter, you can be here...

You can have the whole beach to yourself.

There will be no-one here. It kind of makes you feel alive.

Whilst anyone can come and forage for their own supply,

Jonathan has a commercial licence, and picks two tonnes a year.

As his orders from shops and supermarkets have escalated,

processing the crop has required ever more investment.

This is the HQ.

This is where the magic happens.

And we keep on expanding and filling, which is all good.

Meet our new seaweed washer.

In essence, it's just a big bucket with a Jacuzzi in it.

When it arrived, I'd got my measurements wrong,

so had to speak to my landlord. We had to knock a hole in the wall.

So luckily, I've got an understanding landlord!

'And with limited fridge space to store all the fresh seaweed,

'Jonathan came up with an alternative solution.

'Drying it.' So by doing this dehydration process,

it shrinks it down and it protects your production line...

-Yes, yes.

-..through the year.

It's now their biggest selling product - dried and toasted flakes

they call Welsh man's caviar.

And in the summer months,

25% of turnover comes from his original solar-powered beach shack.

-So this is your empire.

-This is my little pride and joy.

This is the tester. This is where we try and get all the locals

and all the tourists to try different things.

'All the ingredients served here are of Pembrokeshire origin.'

-Can I go crab?

-Crab?

We got crab?

'With fresh laver-bread seaweed as the cornerstone of every dish.

'But what's driving their half a million pound turnover

'through the whole year is the dried stuff.'

We mainly use it as a condiment.

That is absolutely delicious. It's almost like using a salt.

There's a sort of iron-y spinach-y taste to it.

And that is the seaweed that we picked this morning?

-That's the same stuff?

-Yes.

-And they're being sold where?

Just exported to Scandinavia, America, Czech Republic,

and now Japan in October so we're super excited about that.

We're standing here on quite a remote part of the Welsh coast

and yet you're talking about exporting your stuff to Japan

in a couple of months. It feels such a contrast.

I can't quite believe that it works.

No, no, neither can I, really. I don't think about it.

I just do it and then, I think one day, when things slow down...

Just so busy, you know,

you don't really have time to think about it too much.

But if anyone can break into

the multi-billion pound Japanese seaweed market

by selling Welsh laver bread, I think I'd take a risk on Jonathan.

We'll catch up with him in the autumn to find out.

He has taken an old Pembrokeshire tradition

and dragged it into the modern era

and made it work.

And I love the fact that the whole business

started with a list of the things that he loved.

What better way to start anything?

I'm going to try this crab sandwich

and if it's not the best crab sandwich in the world,

I'm going to have to eat all of my words.

That is the taste of the sea in a bun.

July brings the region's late potato crop,

and for generations on these southerly banks,

it was a staple industry for small family farms.

Today, the only way to turn a profit

with most traditional farming practices is scale,

and investing in industrial-sized processing is a matter of survival.

The assumption is that modern farms need hundreds of acres to succeed,

but forward-thinking people are realising

it's not how much land you have but what you do with it.

Geetie is visiting a family with a surprising solution to keep their

25-acre farm alive in Brynhoffnant, north of Cardigan.

On a seemingly unprofitable acreage,

Shann and Rich turn over £600,000 using milk

from their small herd of goats.

Hey, hey, hey, girls!

Come on, beautiful ladies. Out you go. Come on.

Come on!

Good to meet you.

-How are you?

-I'm all right.

What's going on here?

We're just getting the goats out for the day.

They're gorgeous. How many have you got here?

-In total, we've got about 70.

-Wow!

'After leaving her city-girl lifestyle behind in San Francisco

'eight years ago...'

Hello, hi!

'..Shann met Rich and set up home on Rich's then-struggling sheep farm.'

How did you come across your first goat to begin this first project?

Our son Benji had eczema and I said, "Rich, what are we going to do?"

and he said, "We need to get a goat."

And I thought, "Well, why? I've just told you our son is ill!"

But apparently in the Welsh tradition,

they know that goat's milk is really good for eczema, asthma,

bronchial conditions and so on,

so we got one goat and started milking her,

and then we had too much goat's milk

so I started making this handmade soap

and skin cream with the goat's milk in it and later on,

we put a probiotic in it as well, and it works a treat.

Sounds fantastic.

We were just looking for a solution to our family problems.

We really weren't looking to start a business,

although we wanted something that would keep us going on the farm.

We had no idea what we had stumbled onto.

'Sales of their goat's milk drink and skincare products

'have grown by over 1,000% in the past year.

'So they've invested in new on-site facilities and now employ 12 staff.'

Thank you very much.

'Originating from Russia,

'kefir grains are the key ingredient in all their products.'

Now this is what the kefir grains look like.

-It looks like cottage cheese.

-It does, and it smells a bit like...

-Can I sniff?

-Yeah, of course you can.

Mmm... So it's similar to yoghurt and sourdough.

Yes, a live, living culture that replicates itself.

'Kefir grains,

'like probiotic yoghurts are believed to help restore

'the balance of good bacteria in your gut.'

So after that ferments for three days,

we'll strain that out and that is what gets bottled.

How much do you sell this for?

So a 21-day course goes for £39.95.

We are turning over about £600,000 a year now.

That's pretty impressive.

-That's quite terrifying.

-It's terrifying!

We've really got a tiger by the tail.

We had no idea there was so much demand, and now we're just trying to

figure out how to hang on for the ride.

So now we're going to go up to the soapery.

'Their 70 goats are just about keeping up with production.

'Shann is making around 1,000 litres of the kefir drink a week.'

So, just up here to the left.

'And the mixture is also used

'as a basis for her soaps and skin lotions.'

Again, it has our kefir in it.

-It's delicious. Whoops!

-Basically,

it's olive oil and oat oil and rice grain oil.

This is a soap-maker that Rich made out of an old piano.

-OK, so I'm just going to pull it down?

-Yeah, straight down.

Oh! That's gorgeous.

Rich is a bit of an expert at finding and reusing things,

so none of this could happen without him.

-Ooh!

-You're hired!

SHANN LAUGHS

-Do you put these in shops? Are they stocked?

-We do not.

But do you want to expand this part of it,

because it appears to me that this is the easier part?

This is where the growth edge is.

I can't see why you wouldn't have this anywhere.

I do think it's really, really nicely branded

and it looks absolutely delicious.

'With such a rapid growth,

'deciding what to do next is perhaps the biggest challenge they face.'

Could you produce more from this venue here?

I'm American. I want to grow it.

Rich is Welsh. He wants to keep it contained.

We don't want to be in an industrial estate in Swansea.

We want to stay here so that kind of tension of how we grow the business

but keep it sustainable and small enough to live with,

that's the constant question.

GOATS BLEAT

It's fascinating to see how far Shann and Rich

have come in such a short period of time.

But the next step is perhaps the hardest.

How do you expand your business

without damaging the lifestyle you've learned to love?

And as the year unfolds,

we'll discover which path they lean towards.

For Pembrokeshire's remote rural businesses,

reaching the customer is one of the biggest challenges.

For start-up chocolatier Liam,

internet marketing has been the company's lifeblood.

But with grand expansion plans afoot,

Liam has set up a stall at the fine food and drink fair

at London's Olympia...

..to compete for sales with over 800 other artisan food producers.

There's so many chocolate products out there.

It's like, you come to a place like this, and you find out, like,

ten chocolate bars that you didn't even know existed.

It is really important that you grab the retailers' attention.

You know, staying enthusiastic about it and getting the story across.

But with little experience and around 11,000 buyers here

on the lookout for new, innovative products,

advice from other food entrepreneurs is crucial.

How have you worked this show?

We've been letting people try the chocolate,

-asking them where they're from.

-And you've taken all their details down?

We're just two kids from West Wales, clearly out of our depth.

You have to keep going for a yes or a no.

If it's a no, it's a no for now.

It's not a no for ever.

With plans to move to new premises and invest in a fully automated

production line, they need to raise £1 million in the next two years,

so securing a deal with a distributor here

could be the first step to make that a reality.

-Hi.

-Hi.

-Liam, is it?

-Liam.

-Hi. Nice to meet you.

We're NOMNOM. We're a small team of about 14 rascals,

basically a cow shed down in West Wales.

-The product itself...

-Yeah?

-Why did you go with that size?

It's just the perfect size for a chocolate bar.

In, like, three to five years, do you know where you're going to be?

Yeah, absolutely.

We want to make the best chocolate bars in the world.

-In the world?

-In the world.

So if we were to say a starting order of 200 cases a week

and build from there - is that scalable now? Or...

Yeah, we can build up to that, no problem.

-Yeah?

-Yeah.

-OK, so build up.

What's the kind of timeframe?

We'll take on some people and we'll make the chocolate

and it'll be fine.

If you've got the sales before you've bought the kit, bingo,

because then you can go to people and say, "We've got the orders,

"we just need to buy the kit."

Have we got everything we wanted?

-Yes.

-There we go.

-Can we go home now?

-Yes.

OK. Thank God for that!

The end of summer is approaching and the season's stunning wildflowers

have begun to turn to seed.

Beautiful meadows like this

were once a common sight in Pembrokeshire,

but during the 20th century,

around 90% of Welsh lowland meadows

were lost to re-use or redevelopment.

Meadows are enormously important to the biodiversity of our countryside,

but they have a value that goes beyond looking beautiful

and supporting a huge range of different species,

as one family in Pembrokeshire has discovered.

I've come to meet the Sutton family on their 87-acre farm

not far from Pembroke on the south coast.

Former conservation officer Matt and his partner Vicky took on

what was a beef farm ten years ago.

The business focus now

is on the rich grazing land itself.

They harvest traditional wildflower seed from their meadows

and sell it online.

-I'm Kate.

-Hello, Kate.

-Lovely to meet you.

-I'm Matt. How are you doing?

-Isn't this absolutely fantastic?

It's normally a little quieter than this.

Normally you just hear skylarks and grasshoppers.

This is one of the rare days when we bring a machine into the meadows.

I see you've got everybody in the car.

-Hi, guys!

-I've got my partner Vicky and my two boys, Noah and Derry.

-They come along on the job.

-So, for you,

this is a proper family business,

-and the whole family are very much entrenched in it?

-Absolutely, yeah.

I think it's an important thing to make them realise that there is

a future in this kind of old land, that they don't have to...

as Noah once said to me, they don't have to plough it up

and turn it into something else.

'Last year, Matt and Vicky harvested seed from this protected farm,

'alongside six other local sites.

'In this meadow alone, there are 25 varieties of native wildflower.'

I've come to have a look at your bounty.

Oh, look at...

My goodness, that smell. Isn't that just wonderful?

Yeah, nothing like the smell of a ripe hay meadow.

Oh... Beautiful.

Gosh, that is the smell of summer, right there, isn't it?

Sweet vernal-grass. It's got a substance in it called coumarin,

which has got that kind of coconut-y smell...

Yeah. It's absolutely lovely.

'The meadows supply a rich source of food for Matt and Vicky's small herd

'of cattle and their native bees,

'and the seeds are processed with as minimal a cost as possible.'

It's a pretty rough-and-ready low-tech solution

we have to sorting our seed. We've just got a couple of old crates...

-Yeah?

-Just grab a handful or two of this.

So, this is what has come out of the machine?

This came out of the machine, done yesterday.

And then we just give it a quick riddle. The seed drops out.

It's a little bit of stalk... and leaf,

which just goes out to dry and we'll add that into the hay crop.

It does look like you've got an enormous variety here.

Yeah, this is from a lovely farm up in north Pembrokeshire

and it's full of yellow rattle and red clover.

We offer a cut of our proceeds to the people who are kind enough

to let us harvest from their meadows.

It's a small payment that provides some recognition for the fact that

they're treasuring these meadows and keeping them going into the future.

'This isn't a business run for huge profits.

'It turns over just a few thousand pounds a year,

'which they top up by selling their honey and meat boxes,

'and from Matt's part-time work as an eco-consultant.'

I'm sure the big seed companies would laugh at us.

I'm sure there are bits of kit that would do all this sort of thing

a lot more efficiently, perhaps.

Being here, I'm falling in love with the idyll of it.

I'm sure it's not all rural idyll...

Come back in winter, it wouldn't be so easy, would it?

Money is certainly not everything. We earn enough to get by.

But as you can see, we live in an absolutely beautiful location

and we have other riches in our life.

Not just money.

It's hard to argue with that.

The seeds are bagged up in the packing barn,

a beautiful structure self-built by Matt.

-Oh, this isn't a bad office, is it?

-No, it's all right, isn't it?

It's lovely. So, this is the bagging operation.

-Yeah.

-Are these a reused sack of some sort?

They originated from coffee sacks.

And I spend my winter nights making them.

Vicky, you are amazing.

OK, so what do you put in each one?

-Er, 250g go into that.

-OK.

My concern is, if you're selling seed

and people try it and it doesn't work,

that you lose your customer base straightaway.

We do provide free advice, along with the seed, when we sell it.

It's a sort of, buy this and we'll help you create a meadow.

-Yes, absolutely.

-That's very clever. I bet you'd do it for free.

Yeah.

I love the fact that you're so uncommercial,

but I also slightly feel that maybe

you should be a little bit more commercial!

Right, here you are. Put your label on.

Not every business has to be global, not every business has to be big,

not every business has to bring in pots and pots of money.

They have a wonderful partnership with their land and, for them,

I think that's where they get their richness.

They sum up the satisfaction of how life can be

really, really good when you are on the land.

It's mid-August and I'm heading out to the Preseli Hills

in the north of the county to catch up with honey-maker Nick.

Summer is a crucial time of year for the business,

as they start to harvest the crop

and predict exactly how much honey the bees have made.

-Morning, Nick.

-Hello.

What are you doing up here? You're miles away from home!

What a beautiful place, though.

-Isn't it spectacular?

-Amazing, yeah.

'By taking the bees to these hills,

'Nick can increase his honey-producing season

'with the late-flowering heather.'

When I was last here, it was miserable, wasn't it?

It was absolutely pouring with rain and quite cold.

How's it been in the intervening weeks since I've seen you?

Yeah, we've been having a run of poor seasons, to be honest.

-June and July, it was quite cool and wet.

-Yeah.

'Every year, the business' success or failure is at the mercy

'of the unpredictable Welsh climate.'

The bees need at least 12 degrees to fly, and they don't fly in the rain

-either.

-And if they're not flying,

they're not collecting pollen and they're not collecting nectar and

they're not making honey. With all the hives that you've got,

what would you expect to get? What would your total be?

In a bumper crop, in a really good year, we can achieve eight tonnes.

-Eight tonnes?!

-Yeah.

-And this year, what are you thinking?

I think it's going to be an under-a-tonne year.

-Do you?

-Absolutely.

-Do you?

-Oh, Nick. Shall we get these...

-Take these boxes off, yeah.

-Yeah.

'Nick single-handedly moves the frames back to his processing barn.'

We'll soon see how heavy this is.

SHE LAUGHS

-It must be stuck there!

-It must be stuck.

-I'll help you.

-It's sticky stuff, honey.

-OK.

-Back to base.

-Right.

'And to collect frames from all his hives can take around four weeks.'

It's like revealing your own personal gold mine.

Pure gold.

'But under a tonne of wholesale honey

'will only bring in around £16,000.'

-You can see it coming out now.

-Oh, yeah, you can!

'So just to break even this year,

'the family will need to rely on their winter marmalade-making

'and selling Nick's queens.'

So the only way you can keep your business robust is to have...

Have more strings to the fiddle.

It's good to be versatile and flexible,

and that's exactly what we have to do.

When this jar is ready,

how much do you sell it for?

I think it should be worth a bottle of good wine.

Over £10, certainly.

Yeah. Because it's so rare and special?

It's taken us a whole year...or a whole season to produce our crop.

But it's always the same amount of work involved in gaining it.

Well, I think that beautiful jar

is really a pot of gold.

Nick, it's been a real delight to meet you.

-It's been a pleasure.

-Thank you very much.

And I hope August is sunny and the heather honey crop is a good one.

'I have nothing but absolute admiration for Nick, his skill,

'tenacity and commitment to making a beautiful,

'authentic British honey against the odds

'in a place he and his family love and treasure.

'Back in the summer, Geetie met Shann and Rich,

'whose determination to make a living from just 25 acres

'and a herd of just 70 goats...'

-Hello.

-Hiya!

'..meant their successful probiotic milk products

'were outstripping demand.'

Just gorgeous out here, isn't it?

-It's nice, isn't it?

-The autumn leaves are just amazing.

I love it at this time of year.

It's spectacular.

How's the last however many months been for you?

It's been crazy.

It has been a great year, but we've also had some real ups and downs.

We bought a pasteuriser, which imploded.

And so, you know, £6,000 later,

we're out of a pasteuriser and that money is gone.

You were dependent on that one piece of equipment

-for all of your pasteurisation.

-Yes! Yeah, we were.

We were devastated by that.

That was a very bad experience for us.

So when I saw you last time,

you were talking about expansion and whether or not you did or didn't.

We can expand further, we can make more skincare, for example.

So we're going to do that, but we're going to be right here on the farm.

Could you rent land, if you can't buy it, to have more goats?

We could maybe purchase more fields, not immediately around this farm,

but we could expand out.

I'm also very interested in having some other suppliers,

so people who are maybe milking cows

and having trouble with the economics of that,

it's very difficult, could switch to milking goats.

We can't run 2,000 goats here.

It would be beautiful, 2,000 goats here, wouldn't it?

You reckon? You come and milk them! You try milking 2,000 goats!

-That would be gorgeous.

-Night and day, that would be.

I can tell that this is really satisfying you in your life.

It's an exciting place to be.

I wake up every morning and I'm exactly where I want to be.

That's wonderful.

-It is wonderful.

-And I hope you inspire other people.

Cos it's extraordinary.

Oh, well, thank you.

-Bye.

-Bye-bye.

'When I met dairy farmer Will Prichard back in spring,

'his diversification to produce Japanese wagyu beef...

'..was a brave and innovative idea

'to support his traditional family farm.'

Autumn is an important time of year for Will and his Wagyu herd,

but first thing in the morning,

it's his dairy herd that takes precedence.

'Sadly, in the past six months,

'17 Welsh dairy farmers have gone out of business.

'And for Will, too,

'the past year has seen a half-a-million-pound loss

'to the dairy side of his business.'

Oh, look at these!

Aren't they delightful?

'But for the Wagyu side of his business,

'there's huge growth potential.'

So how old are all of these?

These will all be about ten days to two weeks old.

So you've got a mixture here of Friesians and Wagyu.

Yeah, indeed. We've got some fresh ones in the pen over here.

OK. These are real youngsters?

-Yes, they're only a couple of days old.

-Oh, look at you!

'It's taken Will the best part of seven years to get the

'genetics behind these calves right.'

Look how tiny this one is.

-You can look after that one, Kate.

-It's like a little thorn.

It was born premature.

-Oh, really?

-That is actually two weeks old.

-Oh, my goodness.

-So...

-Come on, you need to feed up.

'They're the end result of the fertilised Wagyu embryos

'Will implanted into his cows back in the winter.'

You have to be patient in this business, don't you?

Each calf is not going to give you

any sort of return for a minimum of two or three years.

Every day these animals need looking after,

every day somebody has to come and tend to them

and make sure they're well and healthy,

so it's a lot of investment.

So will these all go for meat,

or will you keep some of them for breeding?

-No, all these will end up on a plate, yeah.

-Yeah.

Next year, we would hope to have

-three to four a week available to us.

-Right.

We'd like to get to eight to ten a week,

I think that's probably the maximum for this farm and this business.

-Right. What a lovely morning.

-Yeah.

'It's been a huge financial and personal investment

'to get just this far for Will and his wife Alex.'

There must be times when you kind of lie awake at night, going,

"Are we doing the right thing?"

Yeah. Yeah, there are days like that,

but I think, certainly in the future,

it'd be very exciting to see it get bigger and bigger.

To grow it any further, we'll have to get more farmers on board.

And that's the next step, really.

You can be, effectively, a kind of Wagyu hub

-for other farmers producing.

-Actually, now having the confidence

to go out and talk to your neighbours,

I'll say, "I've got a good idea.

"I think we can both make a few pound out of this,"

and I really do believe it.

Yeah. And what about for you, Alex?

Do you see this as something that is a kind of rock-solid future

for your next generation?

Your grandfather was fairly revolutionary in his own time,

so it's quite nice to see that William's decided to throw

a bit of a curveball at what he's doing, as well.

I'm sure he'll be remembered for it, one way or another!

Let's hope it's for all the right reasons.

It's been such a pleasure to meet you both.

It really has. And I just... Yeah, I wish you enormous luck.

Hello. Hi.

'Just over the border in Llanboidy,

'23-year-old chocolate entrepreneur Liam had grand plans

'to raise £1 million...'

-Hello.

-Oh, hello, Geetie. How are you?

'..and make a brave move into new premises.'

-Nice to see you.

-In your office, looking very cosy.

My temporary office. I'm in exile.

It's a really exciting day today.

-Why?

-It's first day of us moving into the new factory.

How on earth have you funded it?

It's purely out of cash flow now.

So we haven't raised any money yet.

It's worked out that we can actually do it off our own back.

But you haven't bought it.

No, so we've got two years to raise the money to purchase the farm,

and in the meantime, we're leasing.

Aren't you terrified?

As long as nothing terrifying happens...

it'll be OK.

'The new premises are just over the road from the current factory

'in the old cow shed.'

-Am I going to see you over there?

-I'll meet you in there.

-Are you not going to jump on?

-No. I'm not, actually, no!

'The team have six weeks to move the office,

'their existing production line, and build a new automated one.'

They're completely mad!

'By regenerating the old farm buildings on the new 50-acre site,

'Liam hopes to create a community of small independent businesses

'and a space where they can all grow.'

We'll be back in a bit.

We'll come and help. Yeah.

How many makers or producers have you got coming in?

Four. To start with.

A leather worker,

natural plant dyes,

a potter and then these guys are going to kind of prove the model.

But it's so important that WE get stable and we generate the cash flow

to support it first.

How much money do you need at this point to begin?

50K to get us in.

And that gives you what?

That gets us into production,

so moving everything that we've currently got over,

and then a much better flow,

so we'll kind of be able to double production.

So it's quite a huge burden.

-It's a big deal, yeah.

-But it does keep you going, doesn't it?

Yeah. Although it might appear from the outside that, you know,

we're all having a great time and it's all chocolate factory,

eccentric and all that kind of stuff, it's not.

There is a really serious side to what we're doing.

It's the risk that makes everybody come together and work hard,

-because it matters.

-And does that make you a success?

What makes you a success?

Success is doing what you love doing and having a whole bunch of people

around you that you feel really excited to work with.

And I'm proud of all of those things.

'With winter approaching,

'seaweed producer Jonathan turns the business focus back

'to his range of deli products.'

My first day back in the office.

There'll be a tonne of stuff to catch up on, so...

I think it's been two weeks since I was last here.

'During the tourist season,

'the gourmet beach shack has been the testing ground

'for possible new product lines.'

We did seaweed ketchup with kelp all year.

It's gone down really, really well.

And the plan for this winter

is to develop the product ready for market.

'Jonathan is planning to get six new ranges out to his global retailers

'in the next six months.'

When you look at the menu, what we were doing three or four years ago,

it's completely changed since then.

I think we've gone another level and it's just keep on pushing,

being more imaginative. It's exciting, doing your own stuff.

I'll see you later.

Going to pick up the trailer, take it back,

get a few guys on it and strip it right down.

Just put it away for the winter.

'This season saw the beach shack

'sell a record 15,000 of those infamous seafood sandwiches.'

It's been a really, really hard year.

I've put in some huge weeks, especially over the summer,

you know? I'm off to Japan in four, five days, so, it's just...

It's been probably one of the best years we've ever had.

Always emotional on a final day.

'Jonathan's brave decision to follow his dream

'and leave his office job to sell seaweed has certainly paid off.'

This is my commute and this is my end point and, you know,

to come down here, this beach is just...

I think it's my favourite beach in the whole wide world.

It's never going to be easy to make a living

in Pembrokeshire's beautiful but rugged landscape.

But that challenge has driven real innovation

from the people we've met here.

Now, interestingly, they haven't turned their back on tradition.

In fact, tradition is at the heart of many of their business ideas.

Seaweed biscuits, grass-fed beef, probiotic milk.

But although those ideas may be influenced by the past,

they absolutely represent the future

and a new era of rural entrepreneurship

here in Wales's wild west.

'Next time, we're in South Devon's rolling hills...'

What a beautiful day!

'..meeting six new businesses trying to make a living...'

This is the best-smelling room

-you'll ever walk into in your entire life.

-Oh, wow.

That smell is incredible.

Mmm. That is delicious.

'..in this tourist friendly, food-rich region.'

I never know what the next phone call is going to be.

God, I have the best job in the world.