Why creating quality farmhouse cheese is a beautiful passion for Mary Quicke...

Martin Hesp meets award-winning, artisan cheese maker Mary Quicke at her Devon farm

Occasionally journalists come up against an entity that makes them think something along the lines of: “This is it! This is how it’s done. If we were selling Best of British, this would be right up there at the top of the list.”

Such were my thoughts as I trundled through a leafy corner of Devon the other day in the company of Mary Quicke, MBE. The well-known cheesemaker was showing me around the extensive family-owned farm just north of Exeter. We’d seen the famous dairy and one of the two milking herds but now we were up in the sandstone hills above the Creedy Valley, looking out over a great rural patchwork of woodlands and fields.

Mary speaks with unbounded passion and knowledge about the rural, agrarian and innovative revolution taking place on the Quicke’s estate.

It is a story of determination and independent thought. A tale of great care and attention, alongside innovation and forward-thinking. A narrative of working with nature rather than against it.

I have interviewed Mary many times at her Home Farm and dairy on the Exeter to Crediton road, where 15 generations of the Quicke family have farmed. This week, however, I was given a more holistic tour of the estate and told about the way in which one of the UK’s best-loved brands of quality farmhouse cheddar is created.

“The overall estate is 2,700 acres, the farmable area is 1,350 acres,” Mary told me as we jumped into her car. “About 1,000 acres was essentially re-wilded in the 1880s after the opening up of the Pacific Railway made farming more untenable here in the UK.”

And there, straight away, was a story I’d not really heard about before. I suppose I knew Canadian cereal crops had long ago stolen a march on British produce, but I’d never before linked the opening of a single railway (built between 1881 and 1885) with a downturn in this nation’s rural economics. But that’s the sort of thing you get to learn if you spend any time with Mary Quicke – she is a walking encyclopaedia of agricultural knowledge.

“In recent years we’ve extended the farm to run two milking herds,” she went on as we climbed into the hills. “For our cheese-making, we wanted cows that calve in spring and cows that calve in autumn – each catching the grass peaks in May and in September and October. At one point we had all those cows in one herd... now we have 300 cows in the bottom farm and 300 up at the top, and they graze their own areas. The upper platform was arable before that – and it is amazing to see the way those soils have developed since we put the grasses, clovers and other species in – adding to the organic matter, holding the moisture and just generally looking happier.”

She added: “The health of soils is what keeps people alive and healthy. It’s not just incidental – it is a must-have. And with the help of our healthier soils we are hoping to make this farm carbon-neutral by 2030. We have a huge leg-up because half the farm is woodland and hedges that are already sequestering carbon – but what we’ve seen in our carbon measurement from last year to this year is the amazing movement we’ve made towards becoming carbon-neutral in just a year, because of the things we are doing with our grassland and arable.”

Mary showed me a large field which had, for some time, been used to grow cereals and which now would be under grass and clover for the next two or three years “gathering nitrogen and organic soil matter”…

“For soils to do well, you need to put animals on them and graze. Then it will be two years of arable – then back to grass and clover again. That is now going to be the story on these soils which until recently were growing arable crops. If it’s just arable, arable, arable, the soils will slump in health. Now the dairy cows are fertilising those fields without the use of fossil fuels.”

Mary is excited about such developments. For example, she told me how the farm is now bedding cows in the depths of winter on wood-chips created from the estate’s own forests. “This is

exciting because we put the

wood-chips and animal manure back into the field – and because it’s wood you have a fungal fermentation that breaks it down in the soil. And that starts to activate the phosphorous in the soil. There’s a huge reservoir of phosphorous that is only accessible with fungi rather than by the kind of fermentation it would get with straw and dung. So you don’t need to be importing that phosphorous from mountains in Morocco or wherever.”

“Farming-from-a-bag is what it was called,” shrugged Mary, referring to a more industrialised way of farming which has ruled the roost for 60 years. “It said you don’t need to bother with all these things (such as thinking about wood fungus fermentation) – you don’t need animals or even a rotation of crops. Let’s just make it easy. And we stretched those planetary boundaries and said: ‘Great! Let’s just do it all the time!’ without any sense of measuring or being part of the natural world.

“But we are stewards of the natural world – that is a relationship we all need to have within food and farming. My father used to say: ‘Farmers think soil is just something plants stand up in’. But he was really clear that this was not the whole story.

“Now we are starting the see our part in this complex web of life. We are the custodians of the soil – we are not ‘carbon weevils’ taking carbon out of the ground and spending it. We are stewards of our beautiful world.”

As we drove on through the myriad lanes around the estate Mary talked about how, early in his life, her father had been affected by the ability of the market to simply say a farm’s milk was not required on a particular day. “It could just sit there going off in the churn. As a boy he was determined that this farm would go back to making something people would buy. So in the late Sixties my mother and father put in an application for a licence to make cheese. It took about five years to come through and by that time my father had got into agricultural politics, helping to set up all the environmental schemes.

“So he was spending five days a week in London while my mother, who trained as an artist, was here raising six kids. But she thought: ‘Fine! I can build a cheese dairy!”

The licence came through in 1972 and by 1973 Mary’s mother was making cheese. “That’s half a century next year!” exclaimed Mary. “Myself and my husband Tom came back to the farm in 1983/84 and Tom set about selling the cheese. He realised very quickly that cheese should come from an actual place – not be just cheddar. So we were the first farmhouse cheese that actually had its own brand. With the development of places like Neal’s Yard and the British Cheese Awards, people began to think: ‘Mmmm – there’s some flavours here!’”

I asked Mary if she was worried about a burgeoning vegan movement which decried any products derived from the farming of animals.

“We are probably eating more meat and dairy than perhaps is completely suitable – so I say: let’s do it right. Farming used to seem quite simple, but it’s got a lot more complicated.

“We need to start to engage with the incredible complexity of nature – it’s what keeps us all alive and thriving – but the answers aren’t that simple.”