‘You can taste the land’: the Somerset farmer bringing wildflowers back to cheddar

Tom Calver has sacrificed milk yields to give his cows a more varied diet of plants and believes the result is better cheese and richer farmland

In the rolling hills of Somerset, hundreds of thousands of cows placidly munch lush green grass to produce milk for cheddar.

But six fields stand out. Rather than uniform grass, they have technicolour wildflowers sprouting across the meadows. Farmer Tom Calver said that to allow the flowers to grow he has to keep fewer cows and leave some fields ungrazed as they mature.