Cheese Talk with Richard Clothier

My grandparents, Ivy and Tom used to say, “If you look after nature then nature will look after you”. For us this applies to everything we do when making our cheese and running our business. After all, the Somerset countryside provides our food, our income and our home. For my grandparents this was a simple code of living which meant managing resources without wasting anything, and also nurturing the countryside and animals. Today my family have formalized that way of working into our ‘100% Green’ strategy. ‘100% Green’ is about trying to create a net-positive impact in all that we do, so that the environment and the community are better for having the Wyke Farms business there than it would be without it. It’s also about taking responsibility for addressing climate change. To this end we were the first UK food company to generate all of our own green energy, both electricity and gas, and also recycle our water.

I would encourage any business, regardless of size, to look at a degree of energy independence as I believe that lower carbon equals lower cost. The great thing about renewables, (unlike nuclear power) is that they are very scalable. Just a few solar panels or a small biomass boiler can save a huge amount of cost, whilst helping address CO2 emissions. It takes 10 litres of milk to make one kilo of our Vintage Cheddar, so the quality or the milk and diet of the cows is very important, as is our regional weather. The best milk comes from cows that graze the lush pastures. Our Ivy’s Vintage Cheddar is named after my grandmother, Ivy, who was the best cheesemaker in the family and also the first person to write the recipe down. This is why this cheese drives so much passion for us; it’s my grandmother’s cheese, and if you criticize it it is worse than criticizing my children as the cheese never deserves it! I think this passion for quality is the reason why our Ivy’s Vintage Cheddar is sold in 160 countries around the world – not bad for a lady who never left Somerset let alone travelled on a plane!

My grandparents fostered the belief in us that if you can grow you own food, generate your own heat/energy and look after your water supply then you wouldn’t want for anything. That way of living was vital for them living in a poor area of Somerset in the early 1900s. We hope that in a hundred years’ time people will still be growing grass and making fine Cheddar to our recipe in the rolling hills of Somerset, but in order for that to happen we need to make sure that we leave an environment that is suitable for them. It’s for this reason that I am passionate about sustainable farming and doing all that we can to reduce our CO2 emissions.

In a time that the UN has announced that we must all eat less meat to improve the environment, it’s more important to all of us as farmers and food producers to counter this by doing all that we can to produce food in the most environmentally responsible way. I still believe that the future of energy generation lies on the roof tops of farm buildings and in AD plants, processing farm and food waste, rather than in fracked gas or giant nuclear power plants. People have asked me ‘what if we are wrong about man-made global warming?’ I always reply that we will have created a cleaner, fairer, lower cost world whilst making our family Cheddar in Somerset – how can that possibly be a bad thing?