Norton & Yarrow Cheese Ltd

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Norton & Yarrow Cheese Ltd Norton & Yarrow Cheese make artisan goats' cheese from our own herd of pasture grazed goats.

With beautiful weather like this, it was tempting to feel our grazing season could go on and on! We already went further...
20/10/2026

With beautiful weather like this, it was tempting to feel our grazing season could go on and on!

We already went further into October than I was expecting but at this point we have run out of fields that we can get to without walking the goats over mud.

I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved grazing the milkers this year though - we’ve grazed more goats than ever before and for a much longer season than previously.

Grazing dairy goats outside is still an unusual practice in the UK and bringing this system to life on our farm is a constant learning curve and frankly sometimes really hard work! But it is all worthwhile when you see contented goats enjoying the grass, the fresh air, and the sun on their backs.

And now the work of preparing for the 2027 grazing season begins!

I often like to challenge the ‘myth’ that goats are escape artists by countering that if you have fences actually design...
17/10/2026

I often like to challenge the ‘myth’ that goats are escape artists by countering that if you have fences actually designed for goats, they are no more escape prone than any other farm animal.

While I largely stand by that, I would also acknowledge that goats seem to enjoy proving me wrong. Here is an almost brand new fence, designed by me to be supposedly goat proof and, lo and behold, here are two goats on the wrong side of it. The added irony here also being that the fence is so good that these two ingenious goats couldn’t actually work out how to escape back out of it once they were in.

In the end it was a three person job but we did get them out the same way they got in, and the offending gap has been blocked.

I do sometimes say that I’d lose all my respect for goats if they stopped finding ways to prove me wrong on such a regular basis. I think this is their way of saying ‘challenge accepted’.

Just a typical Wednesday making cheese at Norton and Yarrow!
14/10/2026

Just a typical Wednesday making cheese at Norton and Yarrow!

A sunny, blustery Saturday on the farm
10/10/2026

A sunny, blustery Saturday on the farm

Help needed! We are in the process of re-vamping our website and one of the priorities is to get our stockist informatio...
03/10/2026

Help needed! We are in the process of re-vamping our website and one of the priorities is to get our stockist information up to date.

So, if you buy our cheese, where do you get it? In person or online? Let us know in the comments so we can make sure they get included on our stockist map!

The phase ‘it takes a village’ is usually used about raising children, but I think it is just as true about making great...
30/09/2026

The phase ‘it takes a village’ is usually used about raising children, but I think it is just as true about making great cheese.

Good food and successful farms don’t spring fully formed from the minds and hands of one or two individuals, they result from deep collaboration between peers and colleagues. They come when there is a willingness to be open to learning and asking for help or new ideas and perspectives. The question ‘how could we do this better?’ is something we ask constantly. And it is just as well, as we have loads of things that still need improvement 😂

In September, some examples have included:
🐐 Talking to the technical experts at French company Coquard on how we can improve our cheesemaking processes
🐐 An online meeting of the Grazing Goat Discussion Group with guest speakers telling us about their conservation grazing project near Dublin
🐐 An on-farm six monthly review with Cormac White , the ultimate goat expert and critical friend!
🐐 A meeting and farm walk with Haydn Evans, our mentor through Farming Connect , who is helping us with a strategy for organic dairy grassland management (and many other things!)
🐐 A catch up with Prof Jon Moorby, my DAg supervisor from Aberystwyth University , to discuss the data I’ve collected this summer about goat grazing behaviour
🐐 A visit from Anna Bowen and her dairy discussion group, learning across different dairy sectors and talking about the mindset needed for big on-farm change

We’re always learning!

September 2024 was another milestone for us - when we picked up the keys to Pencrug and began the process of moving from...
28/09/2026

September 2024 was another milestone for us - when we picked up the keys to Pencrug and began the process of moving from Oxfordshire to Carmarthenshire in earnest.

Like so many things in life, in a way it seems like yesterday and in a way it already seems a lifetime ago and it’s sometimes hard to imagine we ever lived anywhere else. There are lots of little changes I notice as I look back on photos from two years ago though - changes in the fields, pasture composition, fences, and of course in the house.

It wasn’t a completely new chapter in our family though as my mum and dad (the one with the collie) lived and farmed at Pencrug in the 1970s and my older brother (the baby in the pram) was born here.

My mum, when she visits us here now, often comments the same thing as I did - that it seems like yesterday that they were living here, but at the same time like another lifetime.

One thing is for sure: time marches on. Nothing ever stays the same for long on a farm, though the mountains, the challenges and the length of the to-do list are perennial.

Last week we started working on our detailed, week-by-week Christmas forecast, taking us from now right up to Christmas ...
22/09/2026

Last week we started working on our detailed, week-by-week Christmas forecast, taking us from now right up to Christmas Day. This models likely milk volumes available from the herd, and expected cheese demand, so we can work out which cheeses to make when and whether (or usually when!) we are likely to run into shortages.

It is such a crucial - and slightly insane - time of year in the artisan cheese world and it usually feels like we could sell an almost unlimited amount of cheese in the last week of November and first two weeks of December, if we had the capacity.

However the reality is that we are not a huge cheese factory: the milk we get from our herd is what we have to make cheese with, and there is no magic handle we can turn to make more milk and cheese appear overnight when we want it. Detailed forecasting helps greatly though, as it allows us - starting from right now - to build up enough stock of each cheese in roughly the right proportions as orders ramp up over the coming months.

It is far from an exact science though - we are dealing with animals in the natural world, as well as various human and equipment based factors, as well as the unknowns of what customers will actually do.

Recent November/ Decembers have seen things like an unexpected cold snap hitting milk volumes, a storm cutting our electricity for 24 hours, and a full-time cheesemaker breaking their wrist.

We always try to do our best to meet demand though and that’s why it’s at this time of year that we ask stockists to give us their best guesses of what cheese they are likely to need in the pre-Christmas period. We know things can change and that no one has a crystal ball, but even a ‘best guess’ is helpful as a starting point. This year our earliest Christmas forecast came in July, and I hear most of the Christmas cheeseboard photoshoots you see in the magazines are done in August.

Anyway, I haven’t bought a single Christmas present or thought about any other aspect of Christmas even slightly, but here’s to Christmas cheese planning!

We’re in the process of ‘soft launching’ our new cheese, Coed Cae.Since early September, we’ve been making very small ba...
17/09/2026

We’re in the process of ‘soft launching’ our new cheese, Coed Cae.

Since early September, we’ve been making very small batches to get accustomed to fitting a new process into our weekly cheese-make routine, and sending out samples for our customers to try and give us feedback. It’s been nice to get comments back like ‘it’s delicious’, ‘it tastes great’ and ‘the packaging is beautiful’.

We’re starting to get our first proper orders trickle in now, so it will be available to buy in a few shops as soon as next week.

If you’re one of our stockists and haven’t had yet a sample, do let us know and we will get you one with your next order. And if you’ve received a sample, don’t forget to have a taste and let us know what you think.

Few things more satisfying than seeing your grass spring back to life. We were pretty fortunate in that most of our fiel...
15/09/2026

Few things more satisfying than seeing your grass spring back to life. We were pretty fortunate in that most of our fields didn’t ever totally burn off but we had nearly two months where the grass barely grew at all. Not a comfortable place to be.

Today the sun is out and the grass looks SO GREEN. No filters on any of these photos. Happy goats, and should mean some fabulous autumn milk and cheese.

Address

Pencrug
Llangadog
SA199SL

Telephone

+447531585847

Website

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