Patrick Holden with one of his calves. Photograph: Steph French Pictures
We look down on the farmhouse where he lives with his wife Becky and four of his eight – yes eight – children. Later we’ll have lunch there around a big kitchen table, the house heated by a groundsource heat pump. The scene is one from a children’s storybook: the farmer, the farmer’s wife, the farmhouse, the cows, the milking parlour. “Exactly!” says Holden. “Think of that image