REGENERATIVE FARMING

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 nds 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 di erently – chie y 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, while improving the provenance, ‘terroir’ and avour 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 o en labelled ‘regenerative farming’.

For those in doubt about the environmental e ects 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, o en shipped from far a eld, and home-grown maize and grass silage reliant on oil-based arti cial 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 re going all day every day for 10 months – just through metabolic heat production. That is one horrendous use of nite resources.”

Despite all of this, Hattan was eventually drawn back to dairy a er taking on a remote 460-acre hill farm called Low Riggs (25 miles north-west of Harrogate) in 2007 with his wife Sally. A er struggling to turn a pro t 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

winter, they are housed and fed on homegrown hay and silage. Arti cial fertilisers and bought-in feed are rarely required because the farm’s pastures are not overgrazed and are given time to regenerate, aided by the cows’ manure.

Each cow only gives around 1,800 litres of milk a year, compared to 10,000 litresplus from a high-yielding Holstein, but the Hattans’ animals live twice as long.

The ancient meadows and pastures at Low Riggs are also being restored with an explosion of di erent plant varieties, which are essential as wildlife habitat and to maintain soil fertility. They are also good for the cheese, which is sold by The Courtyard Dairy and Neal’s Yard Dairy, helping the cows produce rich, creamy milk with a totally unique terroir.

“We’re trying to make Wensleydale the way it would have been made in the 1930s,” says Hattan. “Our vision is to revive an arguably extinct British territorial cheese in a sustainable way.”

There are number of strategies being deployed across the country by farmers that can all be led under the ‘regenerative farming’ label. Sowing a wider range of plant species in pastures, (known as herbal leys), planting ‘cover crops’ (to improve soil between harvests) and reducing ploughing to keep carbon locked in the soil are some of the techniques being employed. There are also related moves to reduce the use of fertilisers and feeds, such as soya, as well as introducing renewable energy systems and wildlife schemes.

At Bwlchwernen Fawr in West Wales, which makes the cheddar-style cheese Hafod with milk from a herd of 80 Ayrshire cows, owner Patrick Holden has been pioneering sustainable farming practices for more than 40 years. The 300-acre farm, which has been certi ed organic since 1973, was recently the venue for the Specialist Cheesemakers’ Association’s annual meeting with regenerative agriculture a hot topic.

“Inevitably more farmer-cheesemakers are going to shi in this direction,” says Holden. “All farms are going to have to or we’re not going to have a habitable planet. It’s an exciting time, but we shouldn’t underestimate how di cult it will be. Farming is about economics, so, if it doesn’t pay, farmers can’t do it. It’s no longer a niche issue – it’s got to go mainstream.”

No nitrogen fertilisers or herbicides are used at Bwlchwernen Fawr, which comprises permanent pastures, rich in wild owers, and elds rotated between pasture and arable crops – such as oats and peas – which are fed to the cows during the winter, along with hay and silage cut from the farm.

During the summer months, the herd is managed with mobile fencing so the cows can ‘mob graze’ the diverse plant life, before being moved on to pastures new, fertilising the land as they go and giving the land a chance to recover.

“Dairy farms have become platforms

All farms are going to have to shi in this direction or we’re not going to have a habitable planet.

Patrick Holden, Holden Farm Dairy

CONTINUED ON PAGE 31

WHAT’S IN A HERBAL LEY?

Rye grass and clover dominate the fields of most dairy farms, but some cheesemaker-farmers are now adding ‘herbal leys’ to their pastures, made up of different grasses, legumes, flowers and herbs. Diverse plant life helps stop soil erosion, fix nitrogen and lock in carbon through complex root structures. There are also extra incentives in farm payments and subsidies dependent on good environmental practice, while the price of nitrogen fertiliser has risen from £85 a tonne in 2000 to over £300 now.

Typical plants found in herbal leys include the mineral-rich ribgrass, drought-tolerant herb yarrow and meadow fescue – a grass which is good for hay. Sweet clovers have nitrogenfixing properties while sheep’s parsley is a good source of vitamins for herds.

For more information, read Cotswold Seeds’ herbal ley guide.

To a conventional farmer, it looks like a bloody mess. But the beauty of the herbal ley is that it forces you into another farming system.

Tom Calver, Westcombe Dairy

for the receipt of chemical inputs and vast amounts of unsustainably produced concentrate feeds, and the terroir of cheese has been lost in the process,” says Holden. “For cheese to have a true terroir it has to re ect the unique characteristics of the ecosystem of the farm where it is produced. That’s all about breed of cow, what they’re fed, how much they’re loved and the skills of the farmer and cheesemaker. It’s an alchemy of everything.”

The idea of terroir and cheese is also a focus for father-and-son team Richard and Tom Calver at Westcombe Dairy in Somerset. Made up of three farms with two herds of 190 and 160 cows, the family business makes raw-milk, cloth-bound cheddar and has embarked on a journey to adopt more sustainable farming methods, partly because of the environmental bene ts, but also in a belief that it will improve milk and cheese quality.

To this end, the farm has stopped buying in soya and no longer grows maize for silage. Instead, herbal leys have been sown and the cows are grazed in a similar way to Hafod, while barley and vetch are grown for silage along with cover crops to help naturally fertilise the soil and x nitrogen. The changes and their impact are being chronicled in a 12-part podcast called The Westcombe Project.

“To a conventional farmer, it looks like a bloody mess,” says Tom Calver. “But the beauty of the herbal ley is that it forces you into another farming system. You don’t have to use fertilisers because legumes x nitrogen. Whatever is happening above ground is also going on underground. All these messy plants at di erent heights and sizes will be re ected underground with di erent root systems. Chicory has a really long tap root that reaches below the sub-soil and draws up minerals. We’ve been sat on these banks of minerals for years, but have never really been farming them.”

The farm has invested £70k in new paths to enable the cows to access di erent parts of the elds without churning up the ground, but this has been o set by a decrease in the use of fertilisers and feed costs, while vets bills have also dropped.

Whether the cheese tastes better is hard to say, says Calver. Westcombe Cheddar is aged for around 12 months, so changes on the farms are only just feeding through in the cheese, although there are signs another cheese – the younger Duckett’s Caerphilly – has improved. It has a more supple texture and warmer, creamier avours, he says.

“This year’s cheeses are really good, but I can’t say why for sure,” he says. “Cheesemaking is such a massive equation, we can’t pinpoint changes on just one thing. We’re trying to promote diversity in what we grow. If we’ve got a really decent microbiome in all the foodstu s we’ve created for the cows, I think that has a positive e ect on the microbiome in the milk and on the avour of the nal cheese.

“If you’re using three or four monocultures, be it Italian rye grass, a bit of clover, maize and soya from China, then that’s not ‘terroir’. We need diverse plants that get into the subsoil and evolve with climatic changes, and from one season to the next. That is terroir to me. It starts from the soil.”

DOES PASTURE-FED CHEESE TASTE BETTER?

The environmental benefits of diverse pastures are well established, but there is also research showing that milk from pasture-fed cows makes better cheese.

In 2017, researchers from Teagasc Food Research Centre in Cork, compared the sensory properties of cheddars made with milk from pasture-fed cows and animals kept in indoors in a total mixed ration system. The pasture cheddars were softer and yellower because of increased beta carotene in the fresh grass, and had a much higher concentration of ‘good’ fats, including vaccenic acid and conjugated linoleic acid. There were also differences in the types of flavour volatiles found in the different cheeses.

Research involving Cantal, published earlier this year, compared the difference fresh grass, hay and grass-silage made on the sensory qualities of the cheese. It found that cheeses obtained from cows fed fresh grass were clearly yellower and had more intense barnyard and dry fruit flavours. They were also perceived as creamier and having less lactic odour than those from cows fed conserved herbage. Overall, cheese made with milk from grazing cows had the greatest flavour intensity.