Dan is the third generation of his family to farm at Crib House.

He started farming full-time at 18, and a few years later persuaded Alex to swap city life for Dorset — a decision she's mostly forgiven him for. For years, Dan watched the farm's milk leave in tankers, undervalued and unrecognised. He started looking for a better use for it and began experimenting with soft cheese. Then Alex brought home a tub of Greek yoghurt, and it was love at first spoonful. Within weeks, Dan was culturing milk on the AGA and straining it through cheesecloth on the kitchen counter. Family and friends cleared every batch. The idea for Dorset Strained Yoghurt had found its farm.

The Dorset Dairy Co started as a farm diversification project — a way to process the farm's own milk into fresh, natural dairy with a clear provenance.

The years that followed weren't straightforward. Bovine TB decimated the herd. Raw milk prices dropped below the cost of production. In the summer of 2023, after watching costs rise with no relief in sight, we made the hardest decision of our farming lives and sold the cows.

We almost sold the business too. But when it came to it, we decided to double down instead.

By then, the dairy had grown into something with a life of its own — multiple product ranges, a growing kefir line, and an all-consuming milk refill business supplying shops across the South West. We choose to source our milk locally through Barber's Farmhouse, whose standards match ours, focused on the cultured products that started it all, and got on with it. That's farming, and it turns out it's not so different from running a food business either.