Making the grass greener Dairy farming has come under increasing scrutiny for its environmental impact in recent years but more and more cheesemaking farms in the UK have changed their approach, particularly how they manage their pastures and the diet of their herds. PATRICK McGUIGAN finds out more about the impact these sustainable measure have had.
WHEN YORKSHIRE FARMER Andrew Hattan invested in a herd of Northern Dairy Shorthorn cows to make Wensleydale in 2010, he broke a promise he’d made to himself many years before. Hattan had wanted to be a farmer from a young age. He studied agriculture at Edinburgh University and had a stint as a dairy farm manager. But a subsequent PhD in nutrition and high-yielding dairy cows opened his eyes to the uncomfortable realities of intensive farming. “I found the intensity, in terms of the animal and human perspective, to be overwhelming as an approach to agriculture,” he says. “Milking three times a day is punishing for man and beast. I vowed never again to be involved with dairy cows.” But the reason for the U-turn was that Hattan found a way of doing dairy differently – chiefly making cheese in a lower yielding system that focused on allowing pasture land to recover from grazing. He is part of a growing number of British artisan cheesemakers reassessing how they farm and their impact on the environment,
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while improving the provenance, ‘terroir’ and flavour of their cheeses in the process. Cheshire-maker Appleby’s, Lincolnshire Poacher, Fen Farm Dairy (which makes Baron Bigod) and Leicestershire Handmade Cheese Co (Sparkenhoe Red Leicester) are some of the big hitters of British cheese adopting more sustainable farming techniques as part of a movement that is often labelled ‘regenerative farming’. For those in doubt about the environmental effects of dairy farming, Hattan’s PhD discoveries might reframe things. He was particularly disturbed by the amount of energy needed to produce milk. Large amounts of concentrated feed, often shipped from far afield, and home-grown maize and grass silage reliant on oil-based artificial fertilisers were needed to feed the cows, while energy, in the form of methane and heat, was constantly being lost from the system as a by-product of milk production. “Those cows that were producing 50-60 litres of milk a day were generating the heat energy equivalent to a two-bar electric fire going all day every day for 10 months – just
through metabolic heat production. That is one horrendous use of finite resources.” Despite all of this, Hattan was eventually drawn back to dairy after taking on a remote 460-acre hill farm called Low Riggs (25 miles north-west of Harrogate) in 2007 with his wife Sally. After struggling to turn a profit with beef cows and sheep on the inhospitable, marginal land of Upper Nidderdale, the couple decided to reappraise dairy farming. Rather than focusing on a high-input, high-volume system, they went the other direction keeping the herd small and adding value to the milk by turning it into an unpasteurised Wensleydale cheese called Stonebeck. Northern Dairy Shorthorn cows, well-suited to the tough landscape, were key to the project, as was keeping numbers low so the animals were able to get all their nutrition from grass and feed grown on the farm, rather than having to buy it in. Today, the farm milks 24 cows once a day and makes cheese from late spring to early autumn, when the hardy animals graze meadows, pastures and moorland. In the
