About Us
Val lives with her family on their smallholding in Cornwall. She has farmed all of her adult life and has degree level qualifications in landscape & environmental conservation and countryside management, having attended Kingston Maurward College, Cannington College and Birkbeck College, University of London. She has worked as a countryside consultant for several years specialising in farm plans, rural consultation, grant applications and general advice and help for those with smallholdings.
She has also worked in rural community development and project management specialising in funding applications having successfully obtained several million in funding for various community and business projects.
In 2006 she set up the award winning business The Woolly Shepherd to try and highlight the prices farmers were getting for their wool, being filmed by Reuters and appearing in an Estonian documentary after winning the 2009 Devon environmental business awards.
She now has a ceramics business called The Woolly Potting Shed, specifically making sheep related items. She also undertakes intaglio printing commissions alongside project management work.
Her passion is pedigree sheep and goats, she has kept sheep since 1983 and has experience of many breeds including Dorset Downs, Ouessants and Zwartbles and she currently has a new pedigree flock of Coloured Ryeland sheep having kept Ouessant sheep, the smallest naturally occurring breed in the world alongside others since 2006.
