Welcome to Cynefin farm

Cynefin Farm is a non-profit Community Interest Company dedicated to fostering transformative change through permaculture and regenerative living education.

We feel passionately about supporting, empowering, inspiring and equipping people with the tools and knowledge needed to embrace conscious, sustainable lifestyles rooted in the core ethics of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Shares. We offer workshops, certified courses, 1:1 mentoring, volunteering opportunities, and community events based around bringing people together around a shared vision of a more sustainable world, doing the best we can to cultivate resilience for individuals and communities. We’re committed to building Cynefin farm as a place for learning, exploring and experimenting with innovative permaculture practices, all the while building connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.

Meet the Team

Nim Robins

CO-FOUNDER, EDUCATOR, DIRECTOR
Nim Robins is a permaculture designer, educator and passionate facilitator, with her roots and fingers deep in the soil. Nim has a deep determination for cultivating change in our world and supporting, inspiring and empowering others to do the same through participatory and creative education. Alongside building up the permaculture systems at Cynefin farm, Nim provides permaculture design advice and consultations, and shares nature-based regenerative education with people of all ages.
Nim is certified with the UK Permaculture Association and regularly shares a wide variety of courses, from foundation level all the way through to full PDC’s and specialist advanced design courses, alongside also supporting and assessing those studying at diploma level with the UK Association. Nim is also a core teacher with Permaculture Children - where she focuses on shifting children's education through inspiring teachers to weave permaculture through their curriculums and learning spaces.
Nim loves to tend gardens, have adventures with her children, sleep out under vast starry skies and swim in the ocean. She’s also passionate about homesteading and self sufficiency in a whole load of different ways. But one of the things that lights her up most of all is to bring people together around a shared vision of resilience and regeneration, and to nurture deep, authentic connections to ourselves, each other and to the world around us.
Pete Lees

CO-FOUNDER, DIRECTOR
Pete is a skilled natural builder and carpenter-crafter and is responsible for all of the beautiful handmade spaces that are building up around the farm. He especially loves to work with the natural shape and form of wood and natural materials and creating spaces that bring people together, inspire connection and feelings of wellbeing, and function beautifully.
Pete is also a passionate homesteader and especially loves turning the abundance of our harvests here on the farm into ferments or preserves, which add colourful taste explosions that brighten up every meal. As a Coeliac, Pete is especially interested in preparing and mastering delicious gluten free food (including incredible gluten free sourdough bread). Together with Orlando, Pete prepares all of the food for our residential courses.
Due to these passions, Pete teaches the natural building and preservation sessions on our permaculture design courses, and is also currently preparing to run some short specialist courses here at the farm for natural builders.
Pete loves climbing, wild camping and preparing amazing food. He also loves heading out bicycle touring with his 7 year old daughter Anoushka, who matches Pete in her love of adventure.
Orando Gibson

DIRECTOR
Orlando arrived 3 years ago as a volunteer, and fortunately for us is still here with us and is an integral part of the farm family. He is a fermenter extraordinaire, garden master, tackler of any task big or small, and friend to the birds. The place would surely fall apart without him.

“Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank”

— Winona LaDuke

About our site

We are fortunate to be based at Ty Rhos Uchaf - a 7 acre site in the North Pembrokeshire national park. It is a wild and wonderful place to be, and has an unusual and locally infamous history.

After an early beginning as a sheep farm, from the late 1950’s to early 1990’s it became a spectacular and successful garden centre and tree nursery, and the extensive glasshouses (now mostly derelict) are from that time. When the owner retired however, the site had a change of use and became an equally popular and successful brothel and nudist campsite, with the largest glasshouse now housing a hot tub, mini bar and some locally still well remembered all night parties. The owners from this time were eventually chased out of town and from the late 1990’s the land, greenhouses and gardens have mostly been left to go wild, with only the house being occupied.

We arrived here in November 2019 and were struck by the wild beauty of the land (if not a little daunted by the sheer amount of restoration and broken glass to tackle with). Something about the land spoke to us - it had been so damaged by human activity - but here was nature claiming it back, and it felt like we could work alongside her to bring the land back to something incredible for both humans and wildlife to live alongside each other. We’ve spent a large amount of time since then restoring the largest glasshouse, spending our time underneath the old tangles of grapes, passionfruit, figs and apricots, doing our best to bring them back into health and productivity, slowly transforming the glasshouse into an indoor forest garden classroom.

The 4ish acres of pasture was very degraded - compacted, overgrazed and bare in many places, with fragments of rubbish everywhere. After a long winter collecting every scrap from the bare soil (all visitors during this time will remember being given a bucket and a pair of wellies upon arrival) we set about reseeding the bare patches with diverse cover crops. This deepened and improved our top soil, whilst increasing biodiversity and feeding the pollinators. We also brought in a small small flock of Shetland sheep for mob grazing our struggling pasture, in combination with a mobile chicken house. We also planted thousands of native, edible and medicinal plants and trees in windbreaks, forest garden and coppice plantations, and have developed no-dig annual gardens.

Five years in we still have a very long way to go, but seeing the wildflower meadow improve year by year is astonishing and shows us that we’re on the right track. We’ve been helped along the way by pigs and goats (both fantastic for bramble clearing) and have now replaced all of them (including our escape-artist-tree-eating sheep) with a couple of carefully managed ponies, who are providing us with great manure for our gardens and who we plan to integrate into farm work more over the coming years.

We could never have done this alone and many volunteers have helped us along the way. This year our focus is on developing our program of community gatherings, building a small wood fired sauna (to get us all through the wild welsh winters) digging some wildlife ponds, continuing to propagate plants and trees, and planting our forest garden areas.