On April 5th 2025 Adam & Lou, alongside Sue Burger and Paula Senior, gave a talk on Conservation grazing with Exmoor ponies to members of the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group AGM at Bronwydd Hall, Carmarthen.
We were asked to share our experience of using Exmoors for conservation grazing here at Llwynbwch over the years since 2016, when we switched from using local larger Welsh Cobbs. In 2016, after much research into rewilding and conservation grazing best practice, our friend and Exmoor specialist Sue Burger matched us up with ponies from Coedywern, Brecon. They loaned us seven ponies and under Sue’s guidance we slowly learned what worked best for us and them to manage grazing for our meadows, wildflowers and grasses. We then took the plunge and decided to take on ownership of our own small herd of ponies.
We really enjoyed sharing our experiences, after an introduction by Sue and then our friend Paula described her experiences with her three young gelding Exmoors on her in nearby Pumsaint, where they are beating down years of rush groeth by happily chomping away!
Carmarthenshire Meadows is an amazing group, set up by and for land owners and anyone with an interest in meadows and looking after meadows. We met some very interesting people during the morning and enjoyed talks by Laura Moss (who has put together and runs the Big Meadow Search which has grown into an imoressive nationwide plant recording project) Isabel Macho (Carmarthenshire’s Biodiversity Officer who’s involved with Wales Biodiversity Partnership and has an incredible wealth of plant and biodiversity knowledge) and Caroline O Rourke from Floodplain meadows Partnership. We hope to open our meadows for a visit from members later this summer.