Can British artisan cheesemakers survive coronavirus?

In a country facing it’s worst health and economic crisis in decades, a call to support our speciality cheesemakers can sound tone deaf – perhaps even frivolous.

Yet while by no means the most pressing demand on the national purse right now, this rallying cry concerns far, far more than your sandwiches or which cheese goes best with which wine.

It’s about history: Britain’s venerable tradition of transforming surplus milk into something nutritious, tasty and unique to the place which produced it.

It’s about our soil and our climate, which together create the best possible conditions for lush pastures and – in the hands of careful, low-impact farmers – meadows replete with wild flowers.

And it’s about people the first, third, fifth generation farmers and cheesemakers who put the environment, the welfare of their staff and their animals and the quality of their produce at the heart of their businesses; and who, without the custom of restaurants and events caterers, face mountains of unsold cheese and with it the real chance of bankruptcy.

“For many of our producers these few months will prove the most pivotal in their histories,” says Jason Hinds, director of Neal’s Yard Dairy.

“A lot of them face the prospect of throwing cheese away if they can’t find homes for it soon.”

Soft and blue cheese producers are particularly vulnerable, because their cheeses can’t be matured for long without going far past their best – but even hard cheese producers are going to struggle, as storage rooms reach capacity and demand dwindles.

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Graham Kirkham, the third generation cheesemaker behind the last remaining raw milk farmhouse Lancashire cheese, reckons he has little more than two weeks before his store room reaches capacity and he has to throw milk away.

“About 75 per cent of the cheese we sold was food service – so when that all shut, it was like an atom bomb going off,” he says.

“Existing orders disappeared and wholesalers who were holding cheese started sending it back.” Specialist cheesemakers by definition depend on special occasions: “We are unique and different. You don’t go to a restaurant or deli for Cathedral City, do you” – so the sudden death (well, deep-freeze) of restaurants, not to mention weddings, food festivals, shows etc left producers like the Kirkham’s hugely exposed.

They’re finding new routes – mail order through cheesemongers like Neal’s Yard Dairy and the Courtyard Dairy, or the little farmshop he’s created at his gate – but “350g cheese sold here and there doesn’t begin to fill the hole of whole wheels of Lancashire,” he points out.

“When we started selling to larger shops, we felt the best way to sell our cheese was in the deli counter, because it’s face to face – more personal,” Mary Quicke, a 14th generation cheesemaker and farmer based in Devon, says wryly. “Now of course the deli counters are all closed and any producer who isn’t on an industrial scale and on the main shelves is struggling.”

So far, so specialist food. Cheesemakers aren’t the only artisans to be derailed by coronavirus. Yet the perishable nature of their product, the means of its production, and the psychology of panic buying in the midst of a pandemic makes them particularly vulnerable. “It’s not like a pub, where I can turn the lights off and furlough my staff. I’ve animals to feed and vets bills to pay.”

Sales from his farm shop feed his family, and his faith in human nature. “It’s amazing how local people have come out to support us. But those sales don’t begin to cover the big costs of farming.”

Then there’s the milking. Lactating cows and goats need to be milked “otherwise they’ll die on me. And that will be a big pile of mess,” says Kirkham bluntly. Reducing the milk is possible, but far from ideal: “They’re on a lactation curve, and if you drop them, you can’t go back,” says Quicke.

Fortunately for her, she’s based near a large cheese factory – the one behind industrially produced, supermarket brand cheddar blocks – which can take excess milk off her hands, but most small scale cheesemakers have no such luck: supply chains are such that redirecting surplus toward the shops is nigh on impossible, and with services and coffee shops all shut there are even fewer routes for it to go.

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“It just shows you how broken our food system is” says Joe Schneider, who makes Stichelton – a stilton-like blue cheese made with raw milk – in Nottinghamshire. Within a month all the cheese he’s sitting on will be past selling, and bound for the muck heap.

“There are farmers with excess milk. We have rooms full of great tasting cheese. And people either can’t get to us or don’t know.” Like soft cheese, blue cheese is all the more vulnerable to this state of affairs for being both highly perishable, and more commonly associated with fine dining than basic sustenance.

Yet now that the interest in what Schneider has called “apocalypse cheese” – grateable, freezable slabs of cheddar and parmesan for stockpiled pasta – appears to be waning, and the feeling we will need some treats to see us through this period is growing, Neal’s Yard Dairy and some of their fellow cheesemongers are set to help makers like Schneider sell their cheese while it at it’s tasting it’s very best: a message reinforced in Jamie Oliver’s Keep Cooking and Carry On programme earlier this week.

Mountains of unsold cheese aside, Schneider is one of the (relatively) lucky ones. He doesn’t own his own farm, so he can – and has – stopped making cheese for the time being. His fear is for people like Kirkham: producers with whole farms resting on them and who, if they go under, cannot easily come back and start again. “I don’t want to sound too dramatic, but Graham is the last person on earth making farmhouse Lancashire cheese. There are three traditional west country cheddar makers left. There aren’t a long list of young people looking to be farmhouse cheesemakers,” he continues. “If we lose these skills, they won’t come back again.”

Losing these doesn’t just mean losing cheese. The tradition of binding cheddar wheels in muslin, or of combining curds from several days of milking into a finished Lancashire, have been handed down over centuries. Buying this cheese isn’t just about sustaining the land, animals and the people that make it: “It’s history,” says Schneider.

“[Producers like this] didn’t invent this cheese, they inherited it.” It’s Neal’s Yard Dairy who, over the past 40 years, have revived British farmhouse cheese, “and become it’s backbone” says Kirkham. “They have built these great names up again: West Country cheddar, Colston Bassett Stilton, Kirkham’s Lancashire.”

If they are to survive, we need to support “this rich, delicate ecological web of specialist makers which we’ve built up,” says Quicke, “because if we lose it, our food system will become more uniform, more barren.” A dairy of some size and renown and 480 years standing, Quicke’s itself will probably survive.

Her fear is for smaller, more vulnerable cheesemakers: those who built themselves up on the farmers markets which are no longer running, sold the majority of their cheese to restaurants and caterers which are no longer open, and whose future now rests in the hands of retailers, and the choice of cheese we buy. ​