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

Dairy cows on Calver’s farm graze on more varied pasture, which he says produces milk that makes cheese with a more complex taste. Photograph: Westcombe Dairy

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.