During my ten years as a teacher, I got very accustomed to the pattern of the school year: the back-to-school dread of late summer, the long and increasingly dark autumn term followed by Christmas carol concerts. Then in the new year come mock exams, coursework, revision classes, and before you know it, the real exams and then end of the summer term with lots of trips out and leavers’ events. As a cheesemaker with our own herd of goats, our year is rather different to that, b

Last year I took a module in ruminant nutrition (i.e. what you feed cows, sheep and goats) as part of my masters in Sustainable Agriculture. I was a bit taken aback when I saw the main essay title for the module was ‘How can ruminant diets save the world?’ I started the module with the vague idea that cow farts are bad for the environment, and that feeding grass is good for the environment, but almost immediately learnt that neither of these things is quite true. For one thin