My father, Elfi Evans, who has died aged 90, was one of a rare breed of truly omnicompetent practising veterinary surgeons, as at ease treating cats and dogs as he was carrying out caesarean sections on horses and cattle, in his native Carmarthenshire.

Ever industrious, Elfi also ran a smallholding at the family home, where he reared sheep, grew vegetables and developed a number of environmental projects with the help of the Welsh government’s Tir Gofal (Care of the Land) scheme to support the natural biodiversity of the region.

The third of five sons, Elfi was born in Bancycapel, Carmarthenshire, to Margaret (nee Williams) and William Evans, and grew up on the family farm there, becoming used to hard work from a very early age. Speaking exclusively Welsh at home, his first experience of English came about during the second world war, from the exchanges he and his brothers had with the Italian and German prisoners of war working on the farm, and American soldiers stationed nearby.

At the age of 15, against his father’s wishes, Elfi stayed on at Queen Elizabeth grammar school in Carmarthen. He had ambitions to study engineering but, persuaded by his father that a veterinary degree was the better option, he started a BVSc at Liverpool University, travelling the eight-hour journey between his home and Liverpool on his Lambretta scooter at the start and end of each term.

After graduating in 1960 and working for a period as a vet in Chwilog, north Wales, he returned to Carmarthen to set up his own practice, The Ark, assisted by his wife, Ann (nee Cadwaladr), whom he had met at Liverpool at combined medic and vet physiology lectures and married in 1962.

By the 70s Elfi’s veterinary practice had developed into a three-partner operation, responding to increasing demands from the farming community across Carmarthenshire – as well as the rise in ownership of cats, dogs and more exotic animals, including an elephant, Valli, kept by the Skanda Vale religious community. In the early 80s he moved the practice to larger premises and started to specialise in diseases of sheep.

Elfi retired from the practice in January 2001, but it was short-lived as his knowledge and skills were urgently required throughout that year with the outbreak of the foot-and-mouth crisis across the UK.

He and Ann had taken on and transformed the run-down smallholding near the village of Nantycaws in the late 80s. There, Elfi created ponds to attract and support wildlife and planted native species of trees within traditional orchard environments. The non-native fir trees, which he planted to provide shelter for the young saplings, were harvested over many years and given away as Christmas trees in return for donations, raising tens of thousands of pounds for the oncology department at Carmarthen hospital, where Elfi had been successfully treated for cancer in the early 90s.

Elfi is survived by Ann, his three sons, Winston, Gavin and me, and eight grandchildren.