Hafod is made on a Welsh dairy farm where almost all of the cows' feed and bedding is produced on the farm's land.
Situated near the coast in west Wales, Bwlchwernen Fawr has been home to the Holden family since the early 1970s. A leading figure in the Soil Association and more recently the Sustainable Food Trust, Patrick Holden's influence on British farming has been considerable, but it wasn't until his son Sam returned to Bwlchwernen Fawr in 2007 that they began making cheese on the farm. Hafod is Welsh for 'summer place' or 'pasture', and it's on such pasture – up the hill from the river Aeron – that the Holdens' 80-strong herd of Ayrshire cows graze when they're not sheltering for winter. The vast majority of the herd's diet is grown on the farm's land, as is the straw for the indoor bedding: for the past four decades the family have been working toward a system where the farm is wholly self-sustaining.
We visit Holden Farm Dairy three times a year, and our visits are different to our other Cheddar selections. As Bwlchwernen Fawr is so far away, when we visit we spend time with the team looking over make notes and correlating those observations with our tasting notes, helping to shape the team's future experiments and approach.