Norton & Yarrow Cheese Ltd

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Norton & Yarrow Cheese Ltd

Norton & Yarrow Cheese make artisan goats' cheese. We are based at the Earth Trust Farm in South Oxf

24/06/2026

Phew, it has been hot this week!

Good for hay making, not so easy for the goats. We switched the grazing rotation around so the milkers are in a field with exceptionally good shade though and a decent breeze, and they seem to be doing pretty well considering. Certainly it is more pleasant out there under the trees than back in the barn 🌳

14/06/2026

The goats definitely know when 4.30pm comes round and milking is due.

The not-all-that-orderly queue forms….

So nice to have some sunshine again this weekend ☀️

10/06/2026

What goes on in a day of cheesemaking? Helen, one of our cheesemaking team here, captured some key moments from her cheese making day yesterday.

Every day of the week is different, but each week follows the same pattern, so this is a fairly typical Tuesday.

🧀 getting milk in from the bulk tank to the vats (from Monday evening and Tuesday morning’s milkings) to start a Brightwell make
🧀 adding starter cultures so the milk starts to acidify
🧀 ladelling the curd (from the Sinodun make we started yesterday) into bags so the whey drains off
🧀 wrapping cheese made last week to go out to customers

Thanks to Helen for taking the time to capture these moments in the cheese making day!

08/06/2026

We’ve been turning to the 1838 tithe map of our farm for inspiration for names for new cheeses we have in development. It shows the field names in use at the time, which are fascinating and tell you a lot about the landscape and how it was farmed.

‘Coed Cae’ is the name we’re planning to use for a new fresh, soft cheese coming later this summer. It’s inspired by the goat curd we currently make for wholesale customers - typically restaurants. But it’s bloody delicious, so we want to create a version that can be sold on the counter for eating at home.

‘Coed’ (rhymes with ‘Boyd’) translates as ‘trees’ or ‘wood’. ‘Cae’ (rhymes with ‘lie’) is one of the fifteen to twenty words in Welsh meaning ‘field’ - according Carwyn Graves, its meaning links to the Welsh verb ‘cau’, meaning ‘to close’ and was often used to signify a field closed in by hedges, to distinguish it from open common land. It perfectly describes this field, which is bounded on three sides by wood and on the fourth by hedgerow.

It’s the field the goats are currently grazing in and we think as a name it captures a lot of what our farming is about - pasture, trees and hedges.

Watch this space for news of this product launching later in the summer! 👀

05/06/2026

Goat Veterinary Society - Best Presentation 2025!

As a non-vet, it was a real honour to be presented with the Nick Clayton cup yesterday at the 2026 GVS Summer Conference. The GVS committee vote for their favourite presentation out of all those given to their autumn and summer conferences each year. And they picked me!

I presented to their summer 2025 conference on my travels for , exploring the pasture-based dairy goat farms of the world.

It was a bit of a shock to hear I’d won this. I guess a bit of a virtual goat tourism went down well!

We seem to have had a bit of a good run on the awards front recently….so now I’m obviously starting to get an uneasy feeling that something is about to go horribly wrong 😂

I thoroughly enjoyed the 2026 GVS summer conference too - which this summer was held jointly with the Milking Goat Association. I came away with lots of new ideas and goat geekiness levels high.

03/06/2026

Kidding is nearly upon us again! Our second kidding group of the year will start next week.

2016 was our first year keeping goats and we were milking 2 goats. Once the June group have kidded, we will be milking just under 200, which will be our largest ever milking group.

But herd development is not just about numbers.

After ten years goat farming, it’s now much more about genetics: breeding a herd which suits our grazing- approach.

We’re looking for goats that:
• produce milk well from forage
• thrive in a grazing system
• cope with the Welsh landscape and weather

Now we’re fully grazing, we can really start to see which animals suit the system best, and that’s what we want to build on.

28/05/2026

Grazing an animal sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but it really isn’t. Goats won’t just keep eating grass no matter what; they’ll stop rather than eat something they don’t want.

So you’re constantly balancing what you’re offering them:
• enough in front of them to keep them happy
• but not so much that the pasture isn’t grazed properly and starts to lose quality.

The grass matters too: we want to graze it hard enough that it is stimulated to grow well and doesn’t get too fibrous (a bit like why you mow your lawn). But we don’t want to graze it too hard because we want those grass and pasture plant species to have plenty of time to grow deep roots and to recover after a grazing event.

We’re managing animals and plants at the same time, and they don’t always need or want the same thing. But we’re trying to keep them both as happy and healthy as we can!

26/05/2026

LONDON CIDER SALON

We throughly enjoyed being part of Trade Day at the London Cider Salon yesterday. A collaboration between and , this was an event showcasing some of the best of British fine cider and artisan cheese to wholesale buyers from shops and restaurants.

It was held on the sixth floor of the Blavatnik Building at the Tate Modern - a tasting with a view! Unfortunately no air con, but all the more reason to keep sampling the cider on offer to stay cool on a boiling hot day 😋

Our favourite pairings of drinks to go with our cheese were Land of Hope and Dreams - a fruity perry from and Pet Project 2025 from

24/05/2026

BEST GOATS’ CHEESE - SINODUN!

We were thrilled to hear this morning that Sinodun was crowned first in the Goat Cheese category at the prestigious Artisan Cheese Awards 🥳. This is the second time Sinodun has clinched the top spot so we hope that shows we are doing something right!

Brightwell was also judged to be of Gold Award standard in the Goat Cheese class so we are feeling very chuffed all round.

Huge thanks as always to our amazing team on the farm that take such care over the work of cheese making and goat tending - and to all our customers and stockists for eating and selling our cheese. Couldn’t do it without you all!

23/05/2026

MENTAL LOAD

Grazing is part of our routine….but there is a still a lot we are doing for the first time, so it’s also something I am often awake thinking about at 5am!

How are they getting into that paddock?
How do I divide up that next field into paddocks?
Is there water there?
Which field do they go to next?
And…..What to do about those ***** mole hills in the fields we want to silage?

We’re trying to build more structure into the week — measuring grass on a Tuesday, setting electric fences for the week ahead on a Wednesday — but there’s still a lot that just lives in my head.

This week we were against the clock to finish a grant application to help us upgrade the cheese make rooms and buy a new vat so we can make our new Alpine-style cheese, Pencrug, at the farm. So I was hammering away at the spreadsheets and didn’t get the next field ready in time. Or rather - I actually thought it was nearly ready until I went to look at it yesterday and realised it was too soft to graze after the recent wet weather. So - plan B! - use a different field we haven’t sorted the fences out in yet.

So I was out in the field at 7am this morning setting out electric fencing against the clock (again!) for when milking finished. Just about did it!!

Managing the grazing really does feel like a 3D logic puzzle, just with goats in the middle of it. Satisfying to see the milkers out looking happy in the paddock I’d (just) set anyway, so I got my reward.

Address

63 Sunningwell Road
Abingdon
OX14SZ

Telephone

+447531585847

Website

http://www.nortonandyarrow.co.uk/

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