AUVERGNE PRELUDE

Last night was all about getting in The Zone? Which The Zone? The Auvergne Zone! Pour quoi? For why? For Cow Club are due to embark on their deuxième biennale aventure en France. And this time we're going to my very own God's Kingdom on Earth: Auvergne. That mountainous, sparsely populated, almost forgotten paradise in central France. A land of heavenly cheese, delectable vin paysan, cured fatty pig and Puy lentils with which to absorb the excess fatty pig.

 But what is Cow Club? Cow Club is a meeting of like minds that exist on a plane that is of a spiritual and gastronomic enormity the like of which has never before been seen. This spiritual plane is to be found sitting astride invisible bridges betwixt the twin planets of Les Vaches et Les Fromages. The brainchild of Neal's Yard Dairy's Bronwen Percival and Fen Farm Dairy's Jonny Crickmore, Octet de Hot Club de France y Royaume Uni au Lait Cru's premier excursion was to Normandy in 2017. I was there, Simon Jones of Lincolnshire Poacher was also there, as was Stonebeck Cheese's Andrew Hattan, NYD's Jenn Kast and Mons Fromager's Max Jones.

 Auvergne will involve all of the above, minus, sadly, my dear friend Max, who is to be found busy performing culinary, educational and environmentally important pursuits en Co. Cork, Irlande, at Woodcock Smokery. We have newcomers though: Paul from Appleby's Cheshire and Neill from Doddington Dairy. PLUS a regal delegation of farming and cheesemaking brethren we met en Normandie.

 If, during my absence, Westcombe Dairy's Milton herd has a heifer calf born of an unnamed cow family then that cow family will be automatically named the Canteloubes, after the man who pieced-together and orchestrated folksongs of the Massif Central, a work which became know as Chants d'Auvergne. A particularly beautiful unnamed heifer may even be crowned Baïléro, after that particularly beautiful Auvergnat song. She'd have to be pretty spectacular though. And then, if a cow was to begin to calve and a shard of golden sun emanated from her withins as they opened-up, then that calf would get the ultimate name: Nectaire.

But after last night's musical and vinous indulgences, today I was being a right old swot on the train to that London. You see, the Cow Club group leader, Bronwen, sent us four research papers to read relating to our trip to Auvergne.

One of these papers is an old review paper favourite of mine from my university studies and so it was good to read it again to remind me all about how cow diet can affect the sensory profile of cheese. To me, maize is still sitting on the Naughty Step and biodiverse, flower-rich meadows are still lounging around in The Great Penthouse of Flavour.

 The many works of the authors of this paper and the one on shared bacterial communities between cow teats and cheese, names like Bruno Martin, Isabelle Verdier-Metz and Marie-Christine Montel, taught me so much about optimising farming to make the most enjoyable-to-eat cheese. The research seems to often come back to biodiversity in the animal feed walking hand-in-hand with the resulting richly-flavoured human feed. And when human feed tastes good then it has more value on all sorts of levels.

 I have much to thank those scientists for, for their work informs so much of what I have done and continue to do on the farm day-to-day. Luckily I'll get to see some of them again when Cow Club visits their research laboratory in Auvergne next week. I shall be Charlie in Willie Wonka's factory.

TOWARDS ZERO CARBON AGRICULTURE

Last Friday I joined bosses Richard & Tom for a road trip to Fir Farm in Gloucestershire for the Sustainable Food Trust & NFU conference on how we might achieve net zero carbon emissions agriculture.

 I must confess to finding it to be a monumentally emotional event. It feels like we are looking into a future of pure, writhing Hell if we do not drive enormous change in our habits. Fortunately, the green food & farming revolution that has been simmering away for decades is about to engulf the status quo.

 Until last week, one could not have imagined the President of the NFU making an impassioned keynote speech at such a gathering, and then for her to be followed onto the stage by the co-founder of the Extinction Rebellion movement. But, thanks to anthropomorphic climate change, farming norms are being stood on their heads and yesterday's meeting felt like a significant line was drawn in the sand. Things will necessarily be different from here.

 On a personal note, I happened to find a new Spiritual Leader in the form of the economist Dieter Helm (for a long while my Spiritual Leader has been a Welsh Black cow called Grassy Tail), who delivered two compelling talks that spelled-out clearly and brutally how the future for food producers will be, with a central tenet being the concept of Polluter Pays.

 And with that concept now hurtling into law, UK food and farming is just about to venture into verdant new realms. The only fear is that a no-deal Brexit occurs and consequently the doors will be open to "cheap" food produced in an ecologically devastating manner which prices British agriculture into nonexistence.

 Of course, I was too busy having my brain expanded/fighting back the tears to take photos, so here, instead, is a photo from half way up Creech Hill this morning, looking out over Milton and Manor Farms.

 When I come to be too old to dream, I shouldn't wonder that this view will feature a great many more trees, the cows will be slightly smaller and of a red roan aspect while the cheeses of Westcombe will sing an ever sweeter, more delicious song.

ESCAPE, part the seconda

At first, when Wayne the tractor driver shouted over my shoulder that my dry cows were all over 2nd Bridge Field and thus all over the maize seedlings, my heart sank a great many miles.

 I had just got 145's back right foot up in the foot-trimming crush too, had clipped her toes and was just starting on grinding her soles down. I was making Good Time. Instead, I had to set her free and, as Wayne charged down the road in the JCB and I galloped over the fields on the quad  was bike.

I was taken by how well all 31 dry cows had done to blend themselves through the hedge, reminding me of a now long-dead Hafod cheese cow called Snork. Snork had a near-metaphysical talent for transporting herself into and through a hedge; the last time I came across her spirit was in a dumper truck I was driving last May and it was lovely to meet her again, spread out through 31 cows in Somerset. Ghost Snork isn't so much my Guardian Angel but my Annoying Spirit Friend instead...turning up for dinner at the most unhelpful of times.

 Fortunately, the dry cows had little time for the maize and had just yanked a few seedlings out like the thugs they are before making their way to the gate into 1st Bridge Field to look at and moo at a lovely ley of white clover instead. Disaster averted AND I got to appreciate what an exquisite early July morning it is in Somerset.

 By 7.26am I was back in the yard, sculpting 145's feet into a beautifully balanced quartet of tootsies and still making Good Time.

This event also affords me the opportunity to share with you a picture of our maize. Make the most of it though, because this, for various very good, ecological, cheese sensory and agronomic reasons, is the last year that we'll be growing maize at Westcombe.

WELSH SHORTHORNS

I had an interesting visit to a Welsh dairy farm today. I was on a Dairy Shorthorn fact-finding mission, you see. This particular farm had converted to organic around 15 years ago and around three or four years ago they went into dairying. The herd is made up of small Friesians (not much bigger than Jerseys), some Channel Island crosses, some New Zealand-type crosses and the Shorthorns.

Hands down one of the friendliest herds of cows I ever did meet. It was interesting to have a look at Shorthorns that had been drawn from several different herds of note and I particularly liked those from the Brookstead herd of Derbyshire, a strawberry roan beauty of an example of which is shown here.

Although perhaps not quite right for the Westcombe farms in bounteous, verdant, sunkiss'd Somerset, the more blended Shorthorns from the Strickly and Marleycote herds would be more our thing. Shorthorns knocking on 7,500ltrs on a diet of grass, haylage, with a bit of crimped barley and cake is not to be sniffed at!

In the farmhouse kitchen afterwards, we looked at Shorthorn ancestry and pedigree certificates and discussed organic vs conventional farming. This farm chose to go organic to get a better price for their produce and didn't really have an ideological urge to go down the organic route. I asked whether they felt their land had improved under organic stewardship and I was told that it was hard to gauge, but what they had learnt was that they used to throw a huge array of chemicals and inputs (and thus money!!!) on the land and they have learnt that much of it was not necessary. If they gave up their organic accreditation now, their farming methods would remain largely unchanged.

However, they'd love a magic, quick organic remedy for rushes. A feeling that I can well understand, having experience of organic dairy farming in wet upland Wales myself. Indeed, when I close my eyes at night, my Mind Cinema is still often to be found playing to me tortuous footage of rush plantations where there should be abundant clover leys.

The horror.

The horror.

ESCAPE!

Imagine my horror when, as I wandered into the yard at about 4.30 this morning, I was met by the sight of a detachment of our young heifers loitering out on a public highway; their paddock fencing left in a parlous state thanks to their hormonal jumpings.

Of course my first move, rooted as I was to the spot by fear, was to call for back-up. However, my wingman - the tractor driver - was eating first breakfast at home at the time. Thus, grabbing a couple of buckets of calf nuts (the bovine equivalent of picking up a couple of buckets of chocolate bars), I slowly walked up to the heiffered road.

In a scene chillingly similar to the final scene in Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds', the calves did not scatter off to Lamyatt and on to start a new life at Wyke Cheddar but instead stayed very calm as I walked through their ranks without a single one of them paying me any heed. The laden buckets were the Rod Taylor to my psychologically broken and weepy Tippi Hedren, our child represented by the calves….but hang on, the calves were the birds? Okay. Rod Taylor was the buckets, I was Tippi Hedren and we had an invisible child and the calves were the birds. There we are. That analogy now works perfectly.

Once they knew what was up, the greedy little beasts came spilling off the road and onto the side of the hill. Which is the moment captured in this photograph.

In the background of this photograph is the handsomely refurbished farmhouse Anna and I will be imminently moving into, which will be a location affording us better scope for spying on these escape artists. Each evening I shall sit Anna by the window with a bucket of chocolate bars and tell her to wake me if the farm's youth are causing a nuisance. The cowherd must have his rest!

END OF FIRST MOB GRAZING EXPERIMENT

Today the milking cows of Milton Farm are having their final strip of grazing in Rick field, 12 days after I turned them in there. This photo shows them a couple of days ago when Somerset was once a sun blessed realm.

Opinion is divided on how well the experiment went, but overall I am very pleased with how the cows did, having never been grazed in such a manner and on such a botanically diverse grass ley before. I honestly thought that they'd refuse to go in there after day one and would eat around all the "funny" plants, particularly the herbs like chicory, plantain, burnet, sheeps parsley, yarrow, etc.

We had hoped that we’d be able to reduce the amount of food we gave them in the sheds at night, but no matter how much I allocated them in the field, they were still licking the shed’s troughs clean, and if I gave them too much grazing then they wouldn’t graze it down properly.

Their milk solids were more erratic than when they were set stocked and their milk urea levels roved about too, the latter indicating a drop in their protein intake, which was very perplexing because they were grazing huge quantities of protein-dense clovers! Hmmm.

We’re keeping the night time feed the same and we’ll see how milk is affected in the coming weeks when they return to their set stocking field rotation tomorrow morning.

This is all a very long term experiment and strip grazing the herbal ley is as much about biodiversity for cheese flavour as it is for doing our bit for improving the farm’s biodiversity (15 or so grassland species vs. three or four). It is also about building resilience into our soils by growing & grazing crops so that they put down deep complex root systems so that the land is better able to cope with extremes of weather – both drought and high rainfall – and also to act as a carbon sink (more organic matter in the soil = more carbon drawn out of the atmosphere).

This afternoon, I shall shut-up Rick field to let the plants to regrow and we’ll be back in there sometime in July for the next round of grazing.

CROP WALK VISITORS

Yesterday, boss Tom, boss Richard and I went on a routine crop walk. This time, however, it was a bit different because we had a rotation of company. First up were Julius and his film crew (pictured here with father and son Richard and Tom).

Later on we were joined by our 2^nd Neal’s Yard Dairy delegation in a week, this one was led by the lovely Gemma. The morning of field stomping culminated in an always delightful lunch laid-on by boss Tessa, which itself culminated in bowls of beautiful, silken roasted strawberry ice cream, made by Westcombe’s resident ice cream maker: Rob of Brickell’s ice cream. 

The main focus of our crop walk was to assess which grass to cut for a snatched 2^nd part of the 2^nd cut silage harvest, before the weather turns. There was also time spent poring over the brave new frontiers for the farming side of Westcombe Dairy and, for the most part, it was a floral scent of optimism and excitement that suffused the air, as we gazed over some of our experiments. The two-year-old herbal leys were looking good and our red clover silage leys were looking excellent and bounteous. Our organically-managed Maris Widgeon heritage wheat was looking seriously impressive and inspiring, which is just as well considering we are growing it for the seriously impressive and inspiring Westcombe sister business: Landrace Bakery of Bath. 

The Lucerne was a bit of a stain on the day and accordingly we’re finding Lucerne growing to be a great ego leveller. Nonetheless, the field looks very pretty, filled as it is with all manner of wild flowers (it is so 20^th century to refer to them as “weeds”) that have decided to spring forth and upset the Lucerne. 

We also looked at the Milton cows grazing the herbal ley in Rick field. It was Tom and Richard’s first opportunity to see this grand new experiment in action and be dazzled by my grazing management phone app (I wear a space suit when using it, to get me in the right and proper spiritual pyramid for such futuristic technologies. The more I use the app, the more I hope for the day that Tina, our cheese turning robot, will have congress with my grazing app, for the possibilities of such a union are endless). I shall write more on the strip/mob grazing at a later date, for there is much to talk about regarding that particular paradox.