First Milk, the regenerative dairy co-operative, and their cheese brand, Golden Hooves, have won two champion trophies and a total of 24 class awards at the Global Cheese Awards. ffinlo Costain spoke to Leona McDonald, the director of Golden Hooves – she said:
We love our cows – where would we be without the cows – they’re part of the cycle. We love them to be outside, grazing on a rich pasture, lots of biodiversity, lots of different plants for them to choose from. This lengthens their life; extends their quality of life and means ultimately that we need to interfere with them a lot less. They can carry on being herd animals as much as they want to be.
Seeing our farmers who operate this way – the love they have for their cows – is something else. Bringing that animal husbandry together and seeing the farmland in its true sense is something quite magical.
We’re over the moon to have won these awards at such a prestigious event. Much of the First Milk and Golden Hooves cheese goes to the independent market but as of now Golden Hooves’ mature and vintage cheddar is available in all 27 Booths stores. We’ve also got a new range of regenerative crackers – these are made in small batches in Wales with regeneratively produced butter and wheat, and foraged herbs.
Three or four years ago, we asked our farmers to sign the pledge – a regenerative farming commitment. We are delighted that 96 per cent of them signed up. And we’ve updated the pledge this year and made it even more comprehensive – we’ve added more about the protection of water courses, kindness to animals and people, and we’re stepping up our welfare practices over-and-above Red Tractor standards.
This is all about giving the consumer confidence in what they buy. We want to shout about regenerative agriculture and the benefits it can bring.
Regeneration means making things better. This year we’ve doubled the independent interventions on our farm: over quarter of 1 million this year. That could be bat boxes, bird boxes, tree planting, herbal ley planting, feed from forage. So much activity – every one of those is monitored and then given a score. Alongside that we have our biodiversity counts and we monitor the bird boxes and bat boxes as well. We’ve also got the largest set of soil samples in the world, where we’re looking at our carbon sequestration across the land and how all of that can work together.
On-farm regeneration is measured and farmers are scored each year and we encourage them – the better they do, the better the milk price.