Patrick and Becky Holden run a 300-acre organic dairy farm in West Wales where the milk from ninety pedigree Ayrshire cows is made into the renowned Hafod cheese. Patrick has been a hugely influential figure in the organic movement since the early seventies when he and five ‘idealistic and arguably naïve’ friends set up a back-to-the-land rural community based on food self-sufficiency at Bwlchwernen Fawr where, fifty years later, he and Becky still live and farm. The community started with 135 acres of hill pasture and a herd of 30 Ayrshire dairy cows with the idea of farming organically, building soil fertility through crop rotation and grazing.
Their philosophy of reverence for animals, giving them the highest possible welfare, and for nourishing the soil, using no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides, guides today’s organic farming standards that more and more people rely on to ensure a humane and wholesome story behind their food. Now, fifty years later, the farm is still run according to its founding principles.
There are now 90 pedigree Ayrshire dairy cows on the farm, which is the longest established organic farm in Wales. The milk they provide is made into about 30 tons of cheese every year. The Hafod cheese, named after the grazing land near the farm, ages for about 16 months in 10 kg rounds before reaching customers as a full flavoured Welsh farmhouse cheese described by Neal’s Yard as providing ‘rich, layered flavours and a supple texture, its interior reveals a warmly golden paste and the occasional blue vein.’
Patrick writes, ‘Our permanent pastures are beautifully diverse with plant mixtures that change and evolve over the years. We reseed with herbal leys in our arable rotation, which is a seven-year rotation moving around about half of our fields: combinable cereals for two years, then a year of oats, peas and barley cut as an arable silage in July and undersown with a herbal ley, which will be fertility building for the next five to six years. Herbal leys are a mixture of herbs, legumes and grasses, normally 12 to 20 species; ours include cocksfoot, chicory, red, white and sweet clovers, fescue, burnet and yarrow. The diversity that the cows graze and eat as forage and the cereals in the parlour, is the ‘blas y tir’ or ‘terroir’ that makes their milk taste sweet and our cheese unique.’
In the early days the community grew carrots and delivered them to Cranks, the first vegetarian restaurant in London, and a few years later Patrick and Becky’s carrots became the first organic vegetables to appear on Sainsbury’s shelves. But over the years Sainsbury’s became more and more demanding about uniformity of size and shape of the carrots (a practice that’s now illegal in France). After having supplied them with organic carrots for 25 years, when they rejected an entire shipment, causing huge waste of perfectly edible carrots, Patrick decided to give up trying to meet their increasingly stringent requirements.
The founding belief behind Patrick and Becky’s philosophy of food and farming is that farmers and consumers must connect spiritually with the soil, with the animals, with the sunshine and the rain, and to be aware of the magical interconnectedness of the elements that produce our food. He is fond of quoting Wendell Berry, the American poet and farmer who said ‘eating is an agricultural act’ and ‘to farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures’. The principle of biodynamic farming, that Patrick studied in the seventies, holds that a farm is itself an organism made up of fields, forests, plants, animals, soils, compost and people, that are all inter-dependent with the spirit of the place.
Becky says, ‘I haven’t left the farm overnight for years. I do a day return to places, but I’m always back here. I love milking. I spend more time with these cows than I do with anyone else. I love this cycle, I know that twice a day I’m going to spend time with the cows. When we’re making cheese, we keep a track on which fields the cows have grazed in, what the weather was like and all of these things will be influencing the milk and the cheese. People send me beautiful messages on Instagram, they’ve never come to this part of the world, but they recognise something by eating that live food and want to connect with the farm.’
As director of the Soil Association from 1995-2010 Patrick developed the organic standards for dairy farming, and during his time there the staff numbers rose from 5 to 180 and sales of organic produce in Britain rose from £50 million to £2 billion per year. He is also a patron of the Biodynamic Association and the Living Lands Trust, as well as an advisor and participant in the former Prince of Wales’ Terra Carta Sustainable Markets Initiative. In 2005, he was awarded a CBE for services to organic farming, and in 2022 an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales Trinity St David for international work in sustainable agriculture.
In 2010 he founded the Sustainable Food Trust that ‘works internationally to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food systems’. The Trust’s work includes informing government policy on sustainable agriculture, and developing the concept of true cost accounting for food and farming, which calculates the real, externalised costs of industrially produced food such as pollution, soil degradation, animal cruelty and the overuse of antibiotics. The Trust also campaigns for the restoration of hundreds of small abattoirs that were closed, partly because of burdensome regulations, and the Trust helped secure a £4 million grant to support existing small abattoirs and to restore some of those that have had to close.
While there is an apparently unbridgeable gap between small-scale mixed farming and chemical-dependent industrial monocultures, Patrick believes there must be understanding and empathy for farmers stuck on the ‘other side’ and that there should not be an ‘us and them’ culture, but that the example of organic farming, with well nourished soils, contented animals and healthy wholesome food, will attract more conventional farmers to adopt agro-ecological principles.
‘We need to be more open and inclusive in our approach to welcoming these conventional farmers who’ve only been doing what they did because it paid them better than organic farming, and say to them, look, let’s measure our sustainability impacts. And whether you wish to call it organic farming or biodynamic farming or regenerative farming or whatever the label is, the important thing is that we are part of one extended cultural community. We are brothers and sisters on the land and we need to love each other, share knowledge and feel as if we are part of one global farming community, working on the land in harmony with nature.’
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