Robin Betts

She said in a very stern voice, there’s no chance of you having your cheese in the Awards this year because the cut off for entries was two months ago.

Why cheese? Well, we have been running a dairy farm here since just after the Second World War but, as always with dairy farming, the milk price has been on a roller coaster journey. The only trouble is there are more dips in the dairy market than there are peaks. So, previously you just sold milk? That’s right, a tanker would come every day, collect the milk and take it off for processing and putting into a bottle for the customer, but the milk price was horrendously low for a sustained period. Because it was my dad, my brother and myself on the farm, it was clear that our average sized family farm could not sustain all three of us unless something changed. That’s when my wife and I had the idea of diversifying into an added value product. We thought about what we could make out of milk that we really liked and of course cheese came straight to mind. Have you always loved cheese? Yes, so it was one of those dream things to do. We did consider other things like ice cream and yoghurt but you’ve got flexibility with cheese and it’s not too seasonal. We wanted something that could sustain us throughout the year. So, we decided on cheese and from that point, in 2004, we had to learn all we could about cheesemaking, as well as cheese dairies, because we had to build one for ourselves. Was it a good excuse to visit as many cheese producers as you could to do some sampling?! It was a bit like that, yes. We were thinking, where else could we go in the world which makes cheese? We joined the Specialist Cheesemakers Association which, the then, Prince Charles was patron of. That’s right, there’s a picture of you chatting with him on your website. I imagine he was really interested in what you were doing here. I met him in 2007 and he asked so many questions. His knowledge of cheesemaking is incredible, he’s clearly got a passion for it. And the sustainability side of things as well? Yes, but back then I wasn’t pushing sustainability that much. It was about four years later that we realised we could become carbon neutral. If I met him again now, we would have an even longer conversation because the journey that we’ve been on since then has been incredible.

Talk me through that. Does cheesemaking usually have a particularly negative impact on the environment? It’s energy hungry. Let’s ignore the ingredients because that gets very complicated, but the actual cheesemaking is very energy hungry and that increases if you’re making a product that needs to be matured for any length of time. Cheddar needs to be matured for something like a year, when it’s got to be sitting between 12 and 14 degrees. If you consider that the average cheesemaker has a warehouse which, in the middle of summer, is going to be stuck in the sunshine – keeping that at 12 degrees takes a serious amount of energy. So, it’s not necessarily the making process that uses high levels of energy so much as the storage? Well, actually it’s both. Storage is significant but making the cheese also uses quite a bit. The average cheesemaker will bring milk in at 4 degrees, but to start cheese making you need your milk at 32. So straight away, you’ve got to heat that milk back up. What temperature is the milk straight after milking? 36 degrees but a dairy farm will put it into a tank that chills it down to 4 degrees so it can be stored and transported safely. With us, it’s a little bit different because we bring the milk in direct at 32 degrees. It comes out of the cow at 36 but by the time we’ve put it into a tank and brought it to the dairy, the temperature has dropped to 32. We also gravity feed the milk in, so we don’t even use any energy pumping the milk into the cheese barn. So, the great thing is that the milk is at the right temperature from the start and we can simply add our starter culture to get the cheesemaking process off and running.

What is the starter culture? It’s what we call the good bacteria in the cheese world. And what is that actually doing? That good bacteria is basically growing very quickly, multiplying exponentially, and by that very process it produces acidity, which you need for flavour. It always amazes me how these things happen for the very first time. Apparently, it happened by accident, but to explain how, we need to finish describing the making process. We’ve put our culture into the milk and ultimately that, along with the natural flavour of your milk, will determine the flavour of the cheese. You then need to get it to separate into curds and whey and to do that you add rennet. The original rennet used was the enzyme out of the lining of a calf’s stomach – that’s where they got it from originally. So, the story goes that there was a chap on his camel travelling across the desert, he put some milk into a leather pouch, which had some of those rennet enzymes remaining in it. By the time he got to the end of his journey, his liquid milk had turned into curds and whey and the curd actually tasted quite nice. So, he was the brave one who tried that first! That’s right, and the process we use now is kind of similar. We put our culture in, stir that for an hour at the right temperature, then we add rennet and stir for a further five minutes before stopping. You then let the milk settle and stay still because you don’t want to agitate it whilst the rennet is trying to do its job of making it all stick together. When you come back an hour later, your milk has changed from a liquid to something that resembles French set yoghurt. Once it’s set to that lovely velvety curd, we cut it into very fine pieces.

Why do you do that? What we need to do at this stage is extract the moisture from the curd and separate the cheese. If you wanted to make a soft cheese, Camembert for example, you would leave more moisture in. So, with a Camembert you’d cut into roughly inch sized cubes whereas for cheddar, you cut it right down to almost a wheat germ size so it will dry quicker. Do you use something like a sieve to cut it up? No, we’re cutting it by hand, going round and round the cheese vat, cutting it into smaller and smaller pieces. Finally, we raise the temperature from 32 to 40 degrees and gently cook the curd. So, is that final cooking part the only time you are using any energy throughout the making process? Pretty much so, apart from the paddles that turn the cheese which are motorized.

You said that you can produce different types of cheese by altering the making process. I know you produced Camembert at one point, so why did you settle on only cheddar? We’ve got a wonderful cave here which is well suited to cheddar, as opposed to something like Camembert because people generally want Camembert to be pristine white. There are other moulds in our cave that will be attracted to that lovely white moulded Camembert, so it wouldn’t look very nice. With this amazing natural storage, why would we want to mess around with Camembert when we could fill our cave with cheddar? The other reason was really down to luck. We did an intensive cheesemaking course with a lovely teacher called Val Bines, and she came here for our first week of cheesemaking to mentor us and then we were left to it. It takes a minimum of six months to mature cheddar so we were making on a small scale for the first five months because we weren’t sure if we would have a saleable product, let alone a good one.

We made our first batch in January and then got a call from Val in June to ask if we knew that the World Cheese Awards were coming up? I had no idea – we were just focused on trying to get the basics right at that point. Val told us that they were going to be at Regent’s Park and that it might be worth entering to get some feedback. She said don’t expect to win anything, but you’ll have judges trying your cheese and they can give you lots of advice. So, I rang the number for the World Cheese Awards and got through to a lady called Linda Farrand who, along with Bob Farrand, actually founded the Awards. She said in a very stern voice, there’s no chance of you having your cheese in the Awards this year because the cut off for entries was two months ago. She went on to say that they were judging in two days and here I was ringing up expecting to enter.

I explained that I’d only just started making cheese so didn’t know about the timings but we were very local, so would she consider giving us a bit of a break. There was a pregnant pause before she replied, I don’t normally do this but if you can get your cheese here by eight o’clock tomorrow morning, we’ll get it entered – one minute passed and you’ll lose your chance. I jumped on the train in the morning, made the deadline and the following day got a phone call to say that Winterdale had won bronze! How many cheeses enter those awards?! About 4,000 from around the world, but they’re not all cheddars of course. You’ll see in our cave that every cheese is tagged with a label which we sew in by hand. The truly ironic thing is that the cheese we entered was batch Zero, it was from our trial batch. You must have thought, wow this is easy! I actually thought it must have been a bit of luck. The next day we went to collect our cheese. I took Carla, my wife, and our son Oliver, who’s now 19 but was only a year and a bit then. We were all standing outside the pavilion in Regent’s Park holding our cheese with the bronze award sticker on, when one of the judges walked out and spotted us. He said, I’ve never heard of you before and I’ve been judging for a long time. I told him that we’d not been making cheese that long, about six months actually, and that this was from the very first batch that we’d made. And we’ve given it bronze, he said, that’s incredible! I did wonder if it was just luck but then the second year we entered, we got silver and in the third year, gold. That really is quite an achievement? Absolutely, we were chuffed. Whatever we were doing was clearly working and the demand ever since we won bronze has been really high.

How much do you produce now? It fluctuates, but we normally produce 10 to 15 tons a year and then we have peaks of demand, like the one a couple of weeks ago where it went into Wimbledon. Do you approach the likes of Wimbledon or do they come to you? That was by chance actually. Our London wholesaler has got us into some really great places like Fortnum and Mason, the Goring Hotel and Ramsay’s restaurants. He presented our cheese to the executive chef at Wimbledon for a blind tasting about three years ago and our cheese was chosen. They then saw our sustainability credentials and as Wimbledon is now really focused on that side of things, we ticked that box as well. So, three years ago was the first time we supplied Wimbledon and then later, we also won a contract with British Fine Foods, who provide the Wimbledon rucksack hampers, to supply the cheese for those as well. We got an email out of the blue to ask if we could provide samples for a tasting, so Carla nicely hand-wrapped six little packages of Winterdale Shaw and off they went. Unbeknown to us, the same chef that selected our cheese previously did the same again, saying he loved it but he wanted them all to be hand-wrapped in the same way that Carla had done for the samples. How many was that for? About 3,000, all hand-wrapped by a team of four but it was done in stages as Wimbledon is over a two-week period. That was a mammoth couple of weeks of cheese wrapping and dropping off at British Fine Foods – in our electric van, of course! You must have gone up to Wimbledon to get a hamper yourself? We did go up there and sat on Henman Hill watching everybody opening our cheese packages, which was great.

The electric van you have just mentioned leads us on to the next part of your journey. When you started off, sustainability wasn’t necessarily top of your priority list, you were concentrating on successfully making cheese. How did that aspect develop? As you say, our first aim was to make good cheese which thankfully we discovered we could. Then, in 2011, I realised that we weren’t really using that much energy so I wondered if we could do all of this just by harvesting the energy from the sun and wind. So, we installed our first row of solar panels and also put in a ground source heat pump that same year. That pump is under where we’re sitting now. It extracts the natural heat energy from the ground and provides us with all of our hot water, which we need when we raise the temperature from 32 degrees to 40 at the end of the cheesemaking process. You now have a combination of a ground source heat pump, two rows of solar panels and a wind turbine. Do you need all of those? Well, I really just wanted to see if we could get off the grid completely, but it was a good decision because then electric vehicles came onto the scene. We were one of the first businesses to lease an electric vehicle and we needed enough electricity to charge that so we could deliver carbon neutrally as well. Another little anecdotal story comes from that same year – we installed the very first public charging point in the South East of England – I have a picture of it on the Zapmap, which shows all of the charge points across the UK. I didn’t realise that you had a public charge point as well – were queues forming to use the only charge point for miles around?! Well, no because no one else had an electric car back then but the funny thing is that we actually beat the mighty IBM to have that first charge point in the South East and that was by just one month! So, you had the first electric charge point in the area and did I hear you say that you also have the only commercial wind turbine as well? That’s right, it’s the only commercial wind turbine in Tonbridge and Malling. The net result of your efforts is that you are now completely carbon neutral throughout your home, which is on the second floor here, as well as the dairy and shop below that. Exactly, we now produce about 16 to 18,000 kilowatt hours of energy but we only use a fraction of that. We do use more now compared to a few years ago, because we have two more electric vehicles, so we now don’t run any fossil fuel vehicles at all.

And as well as running the dairy and the shop, you also wear another hat as a Borough Councillor where you can pass on the knowledge you have acquired on your sustainability journey. I sort of got my arm twisted into doing that when a friend of mine said some younger people were needed so that the Council were more reflective of society. He said, I know you’ve got a young family and a business to run so we won’t allocate you too much. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen and he actually told me that it was my fault really because people recognised the skills I had! They gave me the job of Cabinet Member for Climate Change because of my achievement of having one of the first carbon neutral businesses in 2012 and I love doing that job. How is it going? As a local authority, we’ve done really well with our baseline success but our aim is to be carbon neutral by 2030. That sounds ambitious? It is and what I didn’t realise when I started was that my business was relatively easy to tackle because I wasn’t using much energy in the first place. For the Council, however, I was faced with tackling two really energy hungry leisure centres with swimming pools that need a lot of heating. All I had to do in the dairy was get from 32 degrees to 40 but the pools are around 30+ degrees, 24 hours a day. The job of getting those centres carbon neutral was a massive headache. In saying that, we managed to secure a £1.5m grant towards achieving that target just two weeks ago. That means we can now install ground or air source heat pumps which will enable us to remove the gas boilers from both the Larkfield and Tonbridge centres. I spotted that you’ve already got solar panels at Larkfield? Yes, we’ve got nearly 200 panels on the roof so far and we’re probably going to double that over the next year. So, just one swimming pool requires around 400 solar panels? More than that actually, so we will also need air source heat pumps and maybe ground source as well. They use huge amounts of energy and produce over 60% of all the emissions in the Borough. The next closest to that is the waste services contract and between them, they produce over 80 percent of all of the Borough’s emissions. So, they’re the things that I’m now tackling with my climate change hat on. I love doing that in the same way that I loved doing it for my business. It must be a lovely challenge, especially at a time when the public really understands the need and resources are available for funding but also, technology is catching up. That’s right, we’re starting to see electric/hydrogen refuse lorries in the pipeline. It has to be a mixture of the two fuels because refuse lorries being completely battery operated don’t quite stack up – if we use hydrogen with battery backup, that should work and the technology is slowly improving and becoming more affordable. Now that the leisure centre work is underway, that is my next big challenge. How much of your time is dedicated to your council work? Quite a lot actually. I have a balancing act between my business and family and then thinking about how we progress Tonbridge and Malling to become carbon neutral. I’m trying to make that balance work but it’s not always easy. Do you get paid as a councillor? As a cabinet member, you get an allowance because you do put in a lot of hours but it’s something I’m passionate about, so it doesn’t matter too much.

As a child, I would scoop the top off to get the really creamy milk to put onto my cornflakes in the morning, there was nothing better.

Your surname is Betts and I know from living in the area that there is a farm in Offham which has the same name. Yes, L.J. Betts. That was my grandfather – Laurence James Betts. People still refer to Laurence today. Yeah, he was an amazing chap. In what sense? Well, he set up that farm just after the First World War from scratch, with nothing really. Was he from a farming family? Yes, he was born into farming and one way or another, he managed to purchase the land to start farming a mixture of vegetables, salads and potatoes. That progressed into, what is now, one of the biggest salad producers in the country. Were you brought up on that farm? No, my grandfather ran that farm so my dad was brought up there. He was more interested in livestock and dairy farming so my grandfather set up this farm shortly after the Second World War. It was a great place to grow up – I can remember going down to the bulk tank for the milk, it was one of the old-fashioned ones which had a big lid on it. As a child, I would scoop the top off to get the really creamy milk to put onto my cornflakes in the morning, there was nothing better. Did your parents expect you to continue in farming? Not really, I did love the farming side of life but I also had a real interest in flying. I had an ambition to be a pilot and that might have come from my grandfather who was an RAF pilot in the First World War, maybe that gene from him imparted onto me. So, what took you back to farming? I suppose I probably wasn’t brainy enough to be a commercial pilot. My maths was never that brilliant but I got my private pilot’s license, so did get to fly. I also liked the farm but when I came out of college, I realised that dairy farming couldn’t support us all here. You have two brothers? That’s right, but my eldest brother has nothing to do with farming. My next brother liked milking cows, so he did that job. I didn’t like milking cows, so I made cheese! Things have changed massively recently though. The dairy farm has now gone and L.J. Betts Ltd sold up last year to Marion Reagan at Hue Lowe Farms. She is still a family relation, so that’s quite nice. Our farm stopped producing milk in September last year, which is a bit sad but that’s the way farming is going in this part of the world. It’s really stacked against you and most of the family don’t have any interest in the farm now.

Where does your milk come from now then? I’m now bringing my milk in but ironically, it’s actually quicker because the farm we’re getting the milk from are milking on a much bigger scale. They can fill my tank up in a third of the time it took at our farm, so from milking to here is now quicker than it used to be. Although we’re not using milk from our own cows anymore, we’re still using milk from a lovely local family farm and it’s working really well. What do you think about the future of farming, is your son going to carry on? No, he’s got no interest at all. There is no real succession and that’s what scuppered L.J. Betts really. We’ve got a similar problem here, in that we have no succession for this farm either. Looking at all this beautiful farmland around us, it’s a worry isn’t it? It is because if you don’t get the younger generation taking it up, then there is a real issue around food security. Everyone talks about energy security but the next thing on the list, and it should probably be higher, is food security. Without energy you’re stuffed, but without food you are really stuffed.

So, are there any major plans for the future? No, we’re carrying on with our cheese and honey – the bees seem to be doing their job. We’ve got a nice balance here – I love what I do, I love doing it in a carbon neutral way and I love the fact that I’ve also got my second job helping Tonbridge and Malling, which I’m very passionate about. So yeah, I think with this mixture of different bits and pieces going on, my life is very satisfying, really.