Understanding Our Carbon Footprint
Why is it important to measure your carbon footprint?
Haven’t you measured your carbon footprint already? Isn’t Godminster Farm carbon negative?
While Godminster Farm is carbon negative by 875 tonnes of CO2e per year, this new piece of work focuses solely on the cheese side of the business. It’s great to know that organic farming can help sequester so much carbon but we wanted to understand how our day-to-day running of the Godminster brand was impacting the environment. Hopefully the good work that Richard is doing up at Godminster Farm will offset the running of Godminster cheese.
How did you measure your carbon emissions?
In October 2025 we took a big step forward in our sustainability journey. For the first time, we measured the carbon footprint of our operations – a piece of work that took months of data collection and calculations done by the science team at Planet Mark.
In year 1, the activities we measured were broken into what are commonly called “Scope 1, 2 and 3” and covered things like:
| Staff commuting to the Godminster office in Bruton, Somerset | Powering the Godminster office, warehouse and fridges | Heating our offices with oil and gas |
| Recycling and landfill waste | Emissions from delivering website orders across the UK | Transporting cheese to our cheesemongers, farm shops and supermarkets in the UK |
| Shipping cheese all around the world, including Europe and the US | Visiting our customers both in the UK and the USA by car, rail, bus and air | Attending cheese shows around the world as well as Bath Christmas Market |
In year 2 and 3, we’re also going to include:
| Purchased goods and services | End of life treatment of sold products | Capital goods |
As we now know our ‘baseline’ figure for year 1, we can start making improvements to try and reduce the impact of our business even while we continue to work on the additional areas in year 2. This will all form part of our sustainability journey towards being a carbon net zero business.
About Planet Mark
Planet Mark is committed to empowering organisations to solve the climate crisis. Officially recognised by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Planet Mark is a partner of the UN High-level Climate Champions. Their process and mark is recognised by government and business standards, driving assurance in sustainable progress.
Organic Cheese
How we farm matters.
We believe that organic farming is future farming because only organic farming is legally bound to work with nature to create a healthy, holistic ecosystem with improved biodiversity and soil health.
Science has proven that organic farms can help to mitigrate climate change. If Europe’s farmland all followed organic principles, agricultural emissions could drop by 40% to 50% by 2050. Soil on organic farms are 25% more effective at storing carbon than conventional farms, and have increased levels of biodiversity and higher animal welfare commitments.
Godminster Farm is just one of many organic dairy farms in the UK and has been confirmed to be removing over 875 tonnes of CO2e from the atmosphere per year.
“Nature Repays Those Who Treat Her Kindly”
Richard Hollingbery, owner and founder of Godminster
Glossary
- Carbon footprint: a way of estimating the volume of CO2e released by in the daily running of a business, often calculated over a year, and used to show the impact of a business or product
- Carbon net zero: the balance between carbon emitted versus carbon stored, therefore creating zero impact
- Climate change: long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, both natural and man-made
- CO2e: carbon dioxide equivalent, a global unit used to make carbon emissions easier to compare across industries
- Scope 1: Direct emissions from our activities, like gas used to power a boiler
- Scope 2: Indirect emissions from our activities that we’ve bough elsewhere, like coal burned to create the electricity we use
- Scope 3: All other indirect emissions, like commuting to work or using paper for printing
