Nicola and I moved to Sleight Farm in Timsbury, Somerset in 2003 with the intention of establishing a small flock of Milking sheep and to gain experience working alongside renowned goats cheesemaker Mary Holbrook. We milked goats for Mary and in return had the opportunity to share her facilities allowing us to develop new cheeses with our ewe's milk.
Our first 'experimental' ewe's milk cheeses were made in spring 2004, which were mostly sold by ourselves through the Farmers Market at Bath, and one or two local cheese shops. After a few months we began selling a small number of young cheeses to Neals Yard Dairy, where William Oglethorpe developed the maturing process for our new cheese St James.
After only a year in Somerset we decided it was time for the next step to develop our own cheesemaking facility and began looking for somewhere to put down roots for our business and impending young family. We scoured the country for opportunities and eventually, more by luck than by design in autumn 2005 we were offered a 10 year farm business tenancy at Holker Farm in Cumbria by Lord and lady Cavendish.
We got to work in January 2006 and installed a new sheep milking parlour and a small cheesemaking facility and after around 4 months of building work Holker Farm Dairy became the new home of St James.
In autumn 2006 we decided to run blood tests on our now 120 strong flock of friesland sheep as we had been dissapointed with their milk yeilds and general condition. The results weren't good, the sheep had a disease known as Maedi Visna (MV) which attacks the central nervous system and lungs. We had two options, to live with the disease and have animals that would begin to suffer the effects of the disease at around 4 years old which would affect their performance and ultimately lead to them being culled or dying from pneumonia or, to cull the entire flock and start again with a 'clean' flock of uninfected animals. It was a difficult decision to make but with a new business with a strong focus on our long term goal to run a profitable and sustainable farming enterprise we decided to restock with uninfected animals.
We'll never be sure wether we made the right decision, nearly 3 years on we have still not managed to rebuild our flock of 120 ewe's. This is mainly because there are no MV accredited milking flocks in the UK meaning we have had to import accredited female sheep and rams from France and have had to breed all our youngstock from our own flock. This has meant the facilities we installed in 2006 have never been used to their intended capacity.
Time alone will tell us wether we made the right decision however the 'new' sheep are in much better health than the original flock ever was and as a result produce more milk that is of a higher quality than that of our original flock.