"This is Tina," says Tom Calver and laughs. Tina is a five-metre-tall steel colossus of astonishing agility, a robot to be precise. She - or he? - comes from Romont in Switzerland and was originally invented to turn heavy Gruyère loaves. "We persuaded the engineers to adapt the robot to our cheddar moulds," says Tom, whose Westcombe Dairy is one of the best, most innovative and environmentally sustainable in the whole of Somerset, "Tina is the first of her kind. We named her after Tina Turner".

Fully automated care

Tina's workplace is the cheese dairy's huge ripening cellar, dug almost invisibly into a hill. The robot tirelessly moves along the high wooden shelves, carefully heaves out one of the 25-kilogram loaves, brushes off the rind, turns it once on its axis and puts it back. This procedure helps to evenly distribute the moisture in the cheese and prevents it from sticking to the wooden shelves. It is one of the many steps that turn a cheddar into a super good cheddar.

Refraining from further growth

Westcombe Dairy has been around since 1879, starting as a small artisan dairy, then growing larger and more industrialised until, in the 1970s, cheddar was produced entirely by machine. At some point, the Calvers had to decide whether to continue growing, make considerable investments and face competition from the large dairies in the region. They decided against it. Which didn't make things any easier. "My father Richard didn't produce cheese at all for years, or then only small amounts from the milk of his own cows. He struggled to sell it," says son Tom, who was working as a chef in London at the time. In 2006, he returned to Somerset. On the one hand because he had had enough of city life, on the other because he wanted to help his father. He tried better marketing, but then realised that it was the cheese that needed improving.

Improving milk quality

But how? This is where the junior benefits from his experience as a chef: "I knew: a good dish can only be created with good ingredients. So I needed excellent milk". A long process followed in which almost everything was turned upside down - from the breed of cow and its diet to the technical and chemical production processes and the planting of the pastures. Today, the approximately 360 cows of Westcombe Diary graze on wild meadows with a colourful mixture of grasses, herbs and plants. Fertilisers are not used, which benefits the health and resilience of the whole ecosystem.

"When you focus on quality, many other things take care of themselves. It creates a holistic, agriculturally oriented system of food production," Tom Calver is convinced, and: "It is much better to work with nature than against it."

Not only cheese

His father Richard still looks after the farm and the animals, Tom himself looks after the cheese and the development of Westcombe Diary, where bread and sausages are now also produced. The farm produces a wonderfully complex raw milk cheddar matured for 12 to 18 months, a younger and milder Duckett's Caerphilly, a lightly smoked cheddar and a tangy, velvety ricotta. These are accompanied by a dark sourdough bread made from old grains, some of which grow on the farm's own fields and some on those of a friendly neighbouring farm, from which the pork for the saucissons, sobrasadas (an air-dried, spreadable raw sausage) or finocchionas (salami) also comes, which in turn is mixed with the meat of the Westcombe calves. The neighbourly interaction makes sense - ecologically as well. Because the cheese dairy, bakery and charcuterie form a kind of production cycle: What is left over at one is reused at the other.

The star of the company, however, remains the cheddar. With a production of 100 to 120 tonnes per year, Westcombe Dairy is one of the smallest cheese dairies in Somerset. By way of comparison, the two large plants in the region produce a combined total of almost 200 tonnes per day. However, unlike the loaves from the mini-village of Westcombe, they are not showered with prizes, sold in the best cheese shops in the country and exported all over the world, but end up without a care in the supermarket counters. But something else is decisive: many cheese makers and farmers follow the path of small-scale, artisanal and sustainable production - not always primarily for ecological reasons, but because the result is so much better. And because the versatility of the processes and the energy that comes from working with like-minded people is so much fun. The next step is to move a beer brewery onto the farm. Tom Calver and a few other Somerset farms are already growing the hops needed for this.

westcombedairy.com