It was a right Royal welcome to Wales when the future king and Queen paid a visit to Pant Farm on St David’s Day.

Gary and Jess Yeomans greeted Their Royal Highnesses Prince William and Kate Middleton and gave them a Royal tour of their 900-herd goat farm that for 20 years has been providing milk to a local producer.

Sending off 2,000 litres a day from 600 goats to Abergavenny Fine Foods, the milk is processed into soft goats cheese for the local and national market.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge saw for themselves how the family has achieved success with their vision of sustainability in agriculture with Gary and Jess aiming to produce as much as they can from their own land.

The couple started milking with 100 goats in 2002 and have supplied the local creamery ever since, alongside other Monmouthshire and Herefordshire farmers such as Phil and Carol Morgan.

Running a closed flock for three years, Gary and Jess travelled to France to learn how to ‘AI’ their best goats to top French and Dutch billies (male goats), keeping some of their billies for breeding and selling the rest to other farmers for meat.

“The Royals were interested in coming to a farm which has a local food connection” said Gary, “and although the cheese does go nationwide, it is processed locally and they wanted to meet some of the suppliers and see how the farm sits in the wider rural economy” he added.

The Duke and Duchesses first stop was to see some of the kids in the ‘nursery’.

They spoke with Matt Pugh of Belmont Farm and Equine Veterinary Surgery, who is responsible for helping the Yeomans with animal welfare and then met Dimitri Antypas and Jody Emery who help them with the husbandry.

Then it was on to the business end of the farm where the Royal couple saw some of the many goats that are milked twice a day.

There they met Mike and Edward Westoby who do the contract silage work, planting all the crops and also the combining and the baling and local machinery dealer, Ben Sutton who supplies both the Yeomans and Westoby’s with their machinery requirements.

Then followed a tour of the milking parlour by youngsters Tommy and Meg Yeomans.

“The Duke was very interested in sustainability and we are trying to be as self-sufficient as we can, growing as much food on the farm rather than buying it in” explained Gary.

Feeding maize silage, grass and lucerne silage to their animals, the Yeomans grow oats and just buy in a little minerals and molasses to make it up.

“We are trying to grow more protein on the farm so we have more lucerne and are going to grow some peas and beans so we are less reliant on world-wide influences on the availability of those crops” he explained.

Gary added that Prince Williams is very enthusiastic about sustainability “and spoke about how they had been on the Sandringham estate where their children had done some lambing, he’s quite keen on mixed farming and looking at regenerative and sustainable farming techniques”.

When asked about the way forward for the Yeomans’ self-sustainable plans Gary said that they are going to have to look at renewable energy “as the cost of electricity is through the roof.

“We have already instigated a direct drill for the crops in one pass so reducing the amount of diesel used and may be looking at some small-scale anaerobic digestion as well as looking at some form of electricity generation to offset the high (and rising) cost of electricity and make us more carbon-neutral” he added.

Going inside for a cup of tea, Prince William and Kate met with representatives of the wider farming sector; Dave Edwards, County Chairman of Monmouthshire NFU, Charlie Whitehouse, Chairman of the Milking Goats Association and Stella Owen, NFU County Advisor, to discuss the importance of agriculture to the local economy and hear about challenges and opportunities faced by the sector.

It wasn’t the first time Gary had entertained royalty at Pant Farm as Prince Charles had visited the spot back in 2002.

The next stop for the couple was Abergavenny food market where they had the chance to see where some of the produce made less than five miles away, was sold.

With dreams of carbon-neutral on everybody’s mind and with the present worldwide difficulties that threaten regular supplies of basic foodstuffs, it’s more important than ever now for Welsh farmers to carve a ‘farm to fork’ market and the Royals have helped to highlight what can be done with Welsh agriculture when the opportunities are created.