The first in a series of three articles looking at what local food is produced around the city and highlighting some of the best examples.
"With falling prices in the dairy industry, more than half the dairy farms in the South West closed between 2002 and 2016. Supporting local farms has never seemed more vital, but how have farms in the area adapted? “For us, cheese making is all about farming – you have to be an entrepreneur to survive!” Hugh Padfield from Park Farm, points out. After the reforms in the 1980s that allowed farmers to retain some of the milk they produced, his father tried his hand at artisan cheese making and now the Bath Soft Cheese Company uses just over half the milk produced on the farm, around 550,000 litres a year, for making cheese. Looking around, there’s lots of other examples of creative dairy businesses in the region: Brown Cow Organics yoghurt, Marshfield Farm and Chews Moos ice cream, and a number of other farm-based cheesemakers such as Trethowan’s Dairy and Godminster."
Excerpt from Sustainable Food Trust, August 2017. Words and Photographs.