Norton & Yarrow take a “leap of faith”
Pencrug Farm
Why Rachel Yarrow and Fraser Norton moved their dairy from a tenant farm in Oxfordshire to their own farm in Wales
Things were going well at Norton & Yarrow Cheese. Their two cheeses, Sinodun Hill and Brightwell Ash, had won Best Artisan Cheese at the Specialist Cheesemakers Association Farm Visit one after the other in 2023 and 2024. Their herd of goats was nearly 250 strong. It was not the obvious moment for partners Fraser Norton and Rachel Yarrow to pause operations and move 165 miles away. “It was a bit of a leap of faith,” Fraser says.
It’s not their first. Fraser was a project manager and Rachel an English teacher when they decided to start Norton & Yarrow Cheese in 2015. “If I look back at the beginning, Bronwen [Percival, Technical Director at Neal’s Yard Dairy] was kind or foolish enough to let us have a meeting with her before we’d even got any goats, or made any cheese,” Rachel says. Bronwen’s advice helped them pluck up the courage to apply for a farming tenancy with Oxfordshire charity Earth Trust. Despite their lack of experience, Rachel and Fraser had a clear vision, one Bronwen and the rest of the team could get behind: they would make cheese with their own herd’s milk, on their own farm.
Their tenancy with Earth Trust was designed to give farming businesses a first step on the farming ladder, so from the start they had to think about a possible next step to a bigger farm, if the business succeeded and grew big enough. “We originally designed our cheese making rooms in shipping containers so that we could pick them up and move them [when we were ready],” Rachel says. In January 2025, after a decade in Oxfordshire, they purchased Pencrug, a 120-acre farm nestled in Carmarthenshire.
How to move a dairy (and why make the effort)
Moving a dairy is not like moving house. True, Rachel, Fraser, and their children had to pack up their belongings and load them into a van. But they also had to load 241 goats onto a double decker livestock transporter; multiple seven-tonne cheese making rooms onto lorries; five Luton vans full of cheese making equipment. “As soon as we started thinking about moving to Wales, we did talk to David [Lockwood, Managing Director at Neal's Yard Dairy] and Bronwen about logistics,” Rachel says. With planning, thought, and hard work, all these beings and possessions made their way through the winding roads of the Cotswolds and the Wye Valley before arriving at the Western edge of the Brecon Beacons.
The obvious question: why go to the trouble? As tenant farmers, Fraser says, “we didn't have the flexibility to operate fully the system we wanted to.”
“We’ve become very committed to pasture-based farming for our goats," Rachel says. “We want the goats to graze outdoors as much as possible. However, there is much less understanding and experience in this country of how to make pasture-based farming work with dairy goats compared to dairy cows, so there is a lot of trial and error.”
“The move to [Pencrug] has given us more than 10 times the amount of grazing land,” Rachel says. Because Rachel and Fraser are now owners, rather than tenants, they can also experiment with novel approaches such as agroforestry. “If you've only got a year at a time on your grazing licence, you can't really go about planting trees, which are going to be there [for decades],” Rachel says. With their own land, they can plant willows, hedgerows, and more for the goats to browse.
Norton & Yarrow’s next steps
Pencrug is not just any farm. “My dad was farming in Wales for about 10 years and he worked for the family who owned this farm in the 1970s,” Rachel says. Her mother and father lived on the property; her eldest brother was born there and she grew up hearing stories of life at Pencrug. When she heard the farm was coming up for sale in spring 2024, “it had the ring of fate.”
Rachel's family at Pencrug Farm in the 1970s
“To be honest, the place hasn’t changed all that much in 40 years,” she says. But Rachel and Fraser have plans to make changes: at the farm, with their herd, and in their cheese making rooms.
Developing the Welsh dairy goat
In 2020, Rachel and Fraser began crossbreeding their herd of Anglo-Nubian goats with other breeds. As of 2025, their herd includes crosses of Toggenburg, French Alpine, and Saanen goats alongside the Anglo-Nubian genetics. Their ultimate aim is to breed the ideal healthy, happy, grass-fed dairy goat. (As a Nuffield Farming scholar, Rachel is currently at work on a study of the topic: “The dream British Cheese Goat: could a pasture based dairy goat system ever work at scale in the UK?” Bronwen served as her scholarship reference.)
“Systems where animals are outdoors and foraging their own food are intrinsically very efficient and high welfare, as long as you've got an animal that is suited to that style of farming,” Rachel says. “But unfortunately if you haven't, then it can be very detrimental to animal health and welfare, actually." A short-haired Anglo-Nubian could really suffer outdoors in cold weather, but the French goat genetics along with hybrid vigour bring more resilience.
“Crossbreds generally tend to be healthier,” Rachel says, but different hybrids could prove particularly well-suited to living outside in the Welsh countryside. This spring after moving to Pencrug, Rachel and Fraser’s goat herd began kidding again, with many different variations of breed and cross-breed. They’re now watching and waiting to see which prove hardiest as they grow.
Norton & Yarrow's goats at Pencrug Farm
Investing in agroforestry
A few short months after their arrival, Rachel and Fraser had already started replanting historical hedgerows, and they plan to do more. “Something we want to try is planting some more willow, for example,” Rachel says, which is “very palatable to goats.” In addition to giving the goats something to nibble, hedgerows and willow trees increase biodiversity and soil health.
Making cheese
So, when can we get our hands on some Norton & Yarrow cheese? “We must be on something like batch five or six since we've moved to Wales,” Rachel told us in early April. Thanks to the weekly van Neal’s Yard Dairy now sends to Carmarthenshire, it is slowly but surely trickling back onto maturation shelves and cheese shop counters.
Because the goats have begun milking after a long break, the cheese is tasting “quite high fat and creamy,” Rachel says. “Early lactation milk can be a bit challenging to make cheese with, but when you get it right the textures can be superb.” Going forward, Rachel and Fraser are aiming to produce cheeses that are familiar to anyone who enjoyed Sinodun Hill and Brightwell Ash produced in Oxfordshire. “We're looking for evolution rather than revolution,” Fraser says.
Rachel's dad at Pencrug in the 1970s and Rachel today
One aspect that has evolved: Brightwell Ash, Sinodun Hill, Wittenham, and any new cheese to come will be made with milk from Pencrug. While Brightwell Ash – and its matured version, Wittenham – was always made exclusively with Norton & Yarrow milk, Sinodun Hill was supplemented with bought-in milk from a neighbouring farm. With the increased grazing land at Pencrug, this will no longer be necessary. Every cheese will be made with milk from Norton & Yarrow’s own herd.
From now on, when you taste Norton & Yarrow cheese, you are tasting the result of a pioneering farming system in the Welsh countryside. “We’re still very much ‘on the journey’ towards the farming system we want,” says Rachel as we bring our conversation to a close. “We certainly don’t have all the answers when it comes to doing pasture-based farming with dairy goats in this landscape and climate. There are a lot of challenges and things we still need to figure out.”
“But we like a challenge,” says Fraser.
Sinodun Hill and Brightwell Ash with their new logo designed by Lilly Hedley