School of Sustainability

Twelve cheesemakers, one metric, and no league table at the end

At Neal's Yard Dairy, flavour has always come first. But for nearly fifty years the cheese merchant has chosen its suppliers by more than taste: visiting farms, sitting in dairies, keeping relationships that run for decades. Hafod Cheddar, for instance, has been selected over many conversations at Patrick Holden's kitchen table on his farm in Wales. Holden, of the Sustainable Food Trust, was developing the Global Farm Metric, a framework that reads a farm as one system rather than a set of separate scores.

In 2025 the dairy invited every farmhouse cheesemaker on its books - that is, every maker who farms the animals that produce their milk - to trial the metric. Twelve said yes. Over the following months each spent many hours assembling information about their business and working through the assessment, which covers twelve areas spanning the farm's environmental, social and economic life. Sara Hall, a farmer, former cheesemonger and Bristol PhD researcher who uses the framework in her own work on dairy systems, supported the farms and helped interpret the results.

The dairy had started with straightforward ambitions. Perhaps the trial would yield scores that let them benchmark their suppliers against other dairy farms, spot strengths across the supply base, and give customers a clearer account of how each cheese was produced. People increasingly want to know what a farm does for wildlife, how its animals are kept, whether the business will survive - fair questions that are hard to answer from behind a counter.

What the twelve farms produced instead was a lesson in difference. Some work marginal upland pasture, others rich lowland grass. Some are extensive, some intensive. They differ in soil, climate, labour, infrastructure and intent, and the closer the team looked, the less sense it made to set one against another. A league table would hide as much as it showed - and a snapshot says nothing about direction, about the farm investing hard in biodiversity against one already sitting pretty. The metric held; the ranking instinct did not.

Sustainable Food Trust · Read the source