David Deaville brings his love of music to his cheesemaking, to create two fine organic cheeses, writes Sarah Freeman. Photograph by David Loftus.
Staffordshire Organic cheese was originally made by Betty Deaville of New House Farm in Staffordshire, for her family. Her husband Michael started out as a non-organic dairy farmer, but switched to meat soon after their marriage, although he kept on a few dairy cows for their own use.
In the mid-1970s, and chiefly for health reasons, the family converted to organic, and Betty started making cheese with the farm's milk. At that time, organic cheese was almost impossible to buy. The only people making it were Dougal Campbell in Wales and one or two other small producers in Wales and Yorkshire, most of whom sold their cheese locally. Today, none have survived except Dougal Campbell's Tyn Grug, which makes Staffordshire Organic, a hard, unpasteurised cows' cheese with a sweet, summery tang and a wonderfully smooth texture, the second oldest organic cheese in Britain.
Betty's cheese was so popular among her friends that after about seven years, she decided to go into business. Success was immediate and they enlarged the dairy herd, although it soon became clear that without giving up the meat farming, on which their income depended, she and Michael could not produce enough milk to fulfil their orders. So Betty sold their dairy herd and bought all her milk from a local farmer.
A few years later, Betty's son David, who has a degree in music and in publishing ("Music because I love it and publishing to earn a living"), came home to recuperate from an illness. While he was recovering, he helped his mother with the cheesemaking. David turned out to be a brilliant, instinctive cheesemaker and, abandoning all thoughts of publishing, had soon taken over production entirely, leaving Betty to run the farm shop and grow the herbs which they use to flavour some of the cheeses.
David has not abandoned music, though, and insists on making time to practise the organ and piano and play bass guitar in a four-piece band. If he gave it up, he says, the cheese would suffer. "They feed each other. They're both creative and involve a sense of touch," says David. "Touch is one of my strongest senses. It tells me the state of the curd." For this reason, he will not compromise by using any mechanical aid, insisting on carrying out the whole process by hand, which is extremely hard work.
The quality of the milk is, David believes, one of the most important factors in his cheesemaking, and it involves a number of factors, such as flavour, proportion of solids, and hygiene. The distinctive flavour of organic milk is due to a combination of the breed of cow and their feeding habits. Because of its high yield, conventional farmers almost universally use the modern breed of Friesian, while organic farmers tend to favour lower-yielding, hardier breeds such as Meuse-Rhine-Ijssel or Ayrshire, whose milk is more concentrated and homogeneous.
David currently uses milk from a herd of shorthorns at Broomfield Agricultural College in Derby. The cows are kept in ideal conditions and are not over-milked (another factor to which David attaches great importance), but the milk is lower in solids than his previous supply, which has meant adapting the cheesemaking process. Even now, he says, he is still experimenting.
As the demand for organic food increases, specialisation looks almost inevitable. Most conventional cheese farms in the UK specialise, thus reducing their running costs. And as most of them started out as mixed or dairy farms, they can more easily continue to produce their own milk. This not only means they have full control over the cows, but it also removes any potential risk of contamination during transport. For organic farmers, however, the economics of cheesemaking are more problematic. David admits that producing his own milk would be the ideal, but if he had to milk cows as well as make the cheese, he could not maintain his present high standards.
David has been cheesemaking for over 10 years now, but the past year, he says, has been the most challenging. He was made two offers, one by a supermarket, the other by a large dairy, but while both were tempting, he turned them down because he felt he couldn't increase output without compromising quality. Instead, he converted a barn into a larger dairy and developed a new cheese, Whitmore, a hard, unpasteurised sheep's cheese, with a soft, grassy tang and delicious, slightly gritty texture. The price to be paid for staying small is hard work but the rewards are some of the best organic cheeses in Britain.