Matt grew up desperate to be a farmer, this wasn’t something that’s easy to do form a terraced house near Halifax, he was also deeply in love with Nature. He went off and became an ecologist but with his PhD in ecology he realised that he wanted to see not just one but all the great ecosystems of the world and so jumped into film making, this was brilliant fun and after making programmes such as Coast and Countryfile as well as Planet Earth, Life and Frozen Planet with the BBC he had also met Jenny and with her stuck at home he knew it was time to pack up his bags, find his own place to build a nest with Jenny and put down roots so that he could finally do the most important job in the world, become a farmer. 

 

Jenny is the brains and practical side of the team. Her core phrases are what’s the worst that can happen? And just get on with it.  She also has a never-ending sense of fairness or lack of greed. Jenny is a geologist by training and spent many years working for the Environment Agency in water management and later in flood defence. She’s an expert at water flow, which comes in handy on a Welsh Permaculture Farm.

 

Together they realised that your only as strong as your neighbours and so the effort to feed and strengthen our community has become stronger than ever. 

 

Over time the’ve realised the power of working with Nature, of tuning an ecosystem to get what we all need from it. The biggest work at Henbant now is to fine tune the systems we are in but also to train as many others to work with Nature themselves. 

 

"We are creating Henbant not only as a farm, but also as a garden to grow people."