Meet The Maker – The Home Farmer

We are renowned for our heritage and provenance, and with that comes our love for local produce and support for other food producers, including our local cheesemakers!

We’d like to introduce you to ‘The Home Farmer’, situated in Wensleydale, just a little further down the dale from our Creamery in Hawes.

The Home Farmer and their team have been friends of Wensleydale Creamery for a while now – their family farm has been a dedicated milk supplier to our Creamery for many years. Fresh milk from their herd of happy cows is collected daily from their farm by our tanker drivers, and delivered to our Creamery, where our skilled cheesemakers craft it into our award-winning artisan cheese!

However, The Home Farmer not only supply us with milk, but they have also recently diversified to become cheesemakers themselves.  We are really proud to say that we helped to encourage the family, offering advice and lending support along the way to get their cheesemaking business set up and running; helping them to break into the exciting world of cheese!  It’s great to know that from the visits our cheese experts made ‘down the dale’ to The Home Farmer to impart advice, cheesemaking knowledge and know-how, that we’ve helped a farmhouse cheesemaker set up in the beautiful dale of Wensleydale, synonymous, and famous for cheese! The team at The Home Farmer have done a fantastic job, and the result is an amazing unpasteurised cheese; Old Roan Farmhouse Wensleydale cheese.

As the first-ever stockist and retailer of their cheese in our popular Visitor Centre Cheese Shop, we’re delighted to see them go from strength to strength, and now stock their cheese in our online deli too.

And The Home Farmer team didn’t just stop at cheese!  They created a unique milk vending machine out of an old horsebox, and we’re thrilled to have it pitched up at our Visitor Centre in Hawes every Tuesday!

Get to know The Home Farmer team below…

Tell us a little bit about your cheese… 

Old Roan Wensleydale. Handcrafted on our small family farm in Wensleydale, in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s made slowly to a traditional recipe which results in a cheese that is smooth and creamy in texture. This means that not only is it an incredible addition to your cheeseboard, it also melts nicely so you can cook with it too. We use unpasteurised milk from our happy herd of grass-fed cows.

How would you describe Old Roan in 3 words?

Farmhouse. Creamy. Moreish!

What would you eat with Old Roan?

It makes amazing cheese on toast – on thick sourdough bread, dipped in balsamic vinegar.

What would you drink with Old Roan??

A red wine pairs nicely with Old Roan. We think it goes well with a Pinot Noir, but our personal favourite would be a Malbec.

Tell us a fun fact about The Home Farmer?

All of our cows are known by name and have their own personality to match! Beyoncé likes a good scratch but can be a bit of a diva – when you stop, she gives you a nudge to carry on! Maureen is a trouble maker who likes to encourage others to wander off down the road.

If you were to choose your top 3 items from our online Wensleydale Deli to pair well with Old Roan, what would they be?

We’ve obviously got to go for the classic combination of Wensleydale cheese and Cockett’s fruit cake! We also love it with classic Old Yorkshire chutney on a Fine Cheese Co. cracker.