Crocadon builds true farm-to-fork dining with prize sheep and no-dig growing

But Cox is hopeful for a positive outcome. Shearing and using an alternative spray made up of water, cider vinegar and Cornish salt, along with some zinc wound cream and a dust of sulphur, should be able to arrest the situation.

It's like a scene out of Far From the Madding Crowd and a far cry from the last time I saw Cox six or seven years ago, cooking in the splendour of his state-of-the-art, ergonomic kitchen at Fera at Claridge's – a kitchen he ran as Simon Rogan's lieutenant for three years, earning it a Michelin star within three months of opening.

Having decided to leave Rogan's Mayfair outpost in 2017 after six years as part of the senior team, the Holloway-born chef couldn't have relocated to a more contrasting setting. Crocadon Farm, nestled in the Tamar Valley, covers 120 acres of lush, rolling landscape on the outskirts of the quaint Cornish parish of St Mellion, close to the Devon border. At its heart is Crocadon, a small but charming, 25-seat Green Michelin-starred restaurant, set in one of the estate's historic stone buildings, which officially launched in February. While it's easy to draw parallels between Crocadon Farm and Our Farm, Rogan's 15-acre farm in the Cartmel Valley, which Cox helped to develop for the Umbel Restaurant Group 12 years ago, there are significant differences, not least in its size.

"I wasn't really inspired to do this thing in particular – it was just the path I took. I was friends with Simon before I went to work for him, and then kind of became his right-hand man and accidently ended up building the farm in Cumbria. It just became clear to me – especially when I moved back to London to open Fera – that I needed to be somewhere where things were grown because it was just a much better version and the idea of taking on a farm felt like the next step."

Regenerative farming at Crocadon

Cox's dream of a soil-centric, farm-first business was supposed to lead him to opening the restaurant soon after his arrival. But the work involved in developing a business that focused on regenerative agriculture – farming and grazing practices that reverse climate change by rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil biodiversity – not to mention the C-word, meant that the restaurant would take a full five years.

"The whole idea was to get on to a farm and explore every aspect of farming and how it could be better – what are the pinch-points, for example? You can say that everyone should be working with no-dig beds and not touch the soil, but what I've learned is that it doesn't even begin to work on a commercial scale," says the former Roux scholar. "You must try to understand each area and aspect of farming and growing and how one can learn from another. Covid set me back in terms of opening the restaurant, but it pushed me forward in developing the farm, which is just as important."

Having established most of the planting of vegetables on the farm, built the polytunnels, a wash station and a dedicated area for propagation, while also spending a period of time growing vegetables commercially for high-end vegetable supplier Natoora, Cox has taken a step back from growing on most of the arable land at Crocadon Farm this year and handed that over to Tim Williams and his wife Claire Hannington-Williams, farmers and growers specialising in regenerative agriculture and sustainable farming, who Cox met early on in his livestock journey.

"Tim is overseeing the arable fields and is growing a landrace wheat, Red Lammas [a wheat dating back to the Tudors], which was grown here historically and works really well, and Ölands heritage variety [first grown on the Swedish island of Øland nearly 6,000 years ago], which is very good for bread," says Cox. "He's got all the kit, and in the agricultural barn he's created a grain-processing area. He's got silos in there to store the grains, and he's built a large room to start milling the grain to produce flour."

Mamm, the on-site cafe

It's very much a collaborative approach at Crocadon Farm, with Cox running the restaurant, bakery, pottery and managing the livestock and pastureland, while the Williamses take care of the growing and on-site café called Mamm, situated in the courtyard.

Also in the courtyard, at 90 degrees to the restaurant, is Cox's bakery, which is open on Fridays and Saturdays, from 10am, selling sourdough bread, croissants, pastries and other delights centred around produce from the farm, alongside organic and regenerative ingredients from like-minded people.

There's also a micro-brewery housed within the stone buildings, originally created by Cox during his early days on the farm, which has been passed to master brewer James Rylance (ex-the Kernel and Beavertown), who has rebranded the space as Ideal Day Family Brewery.

Such developments wouldn't have been possible without a business angel floating in to inject some cash. "To get this to move forward any further, we clearly needed more money – farms are money pits, and I didn't come here with that much," he says. "I'd built quite a bit of the farming infrastructure myself, but I'd put the restaurant – which I'd also fitted out and refurbished with the help of my head chef Michael Thompson – on hold to get to a point where all the farming was working. Through Tim and Claire, an investor has come along which allows us all to work together."

Critically, the opportunity to have several enterprises working side by side has enabled Cox and his colleagues to establish a full-circle system to feed into all the businesses, as well as going beyond zero waste with all organic matter returning to the farm, used in ceramics, or used to feed plants.

"For example, Tim is using the arable fields to grow super-diverse cover crops, building soil and bringing beauty to the area, or growing his heritage grains, which go into the bakery here as well as the micro-brewery, and he also sells his grains to others. Tim's farming those fields, he sells us the wheat, we make the bread, and we sell the bread back to Mamm. Claire has opened a café that has allowed us to transition this space [initially run last autumn as a supper-club concept] into the restaurant. We all have our own enterprise."

Cox has retained all the permanent pasture, which must stay as such, and took the sheep back from Williams in March growing the flock slightly by bringing in some more breeding ewes and some more of his original stock. There are about 80 sheep at Crocadon Farm of varying heritage breeds, including Zwartbles, Romneys, and crossbreeds including Blue Texels, Greyface Dartmoors, Black Welsh Mountains, Lleyns, Suffolks and Jacobs.

"We're fully in control of the whole process," says Cox, "particularly determining when we take the animals to slaughter and the ageing profile of six to eight weeks before the meat is due to be eaten in the restaurant. It's very hard to make decisions two months out, but that's what you've got to do."

Typically, Cox, who worked as a butcher's assistant at the age of 14, takes four to six animals to slaughter once a month. "We've got four in the fridge now, and I'm picking up six more tomorrow morning – we haven't run out yet, and we haven't got freezers full either!" Having tried a couple of types of meat, for the time being, he is focusing on mutton.

Cox's view on sustainable and organic produce has been something that's been with him since childhood. "I was always quite aware that food could contain toxic things," he says, adding that his mother is vegetarian. "Growing up in the city and then visiting the countryside and seeing how nature grows, I quickly worked out that produce was at its best when done in the most natural way possible."

When he became a chef, his quest to find "perfection, flavour and pureness" in ingredients continued. "If you're going to put meat on the menu, you want to know it's had the best diet possible, it was in the best health possible, and there's nothing toxic in there. At what point did people decide to put toxic things into plants and animals and think it was a good idea?"

So, despite the odd bout of flystrike, he's in his element and will continue to cherish the opportunity he has running a restaurant surrounded by some of the finest ingredients available in this part of the world, treating the soil, the plants, and the livestock with the greatest of respect and consideration.

"People have a duty and obligation to be sympathetic to the land. I know that when it comes to food, being at one with nature will produce food that is really good for us, and it will produce food that has high levels of flavour. As a chef, you want your food to taste as good as it possibly can, and the best way to do that is to look at the health of the soil, the health of the plants, and the health of the animals."

Crocadon, the restaurant

Housed in one of the original farm buildings, Crocadon is a minimalist but cosy, texture-rich space, renovated last year almost entirely by Dan Cox and his head chef Michael Thompson, with Cox using YouTube masterclasses to fill any lack of know-how in electrics, plumbing, building work, carpentry, and tiling.

Diners approach the building by meandering through a sizeable entrance garden where produce, such as artichokes, squash, Mexican marigold, highly perfumed roses (used in flavouring), and a whole host of herbs, including lemon verbena, parsley, anise hyssop, savory, and mint, are grown and harvested by Cox and the team exclusively for use in the restaurant.

Once inside, a luxurious and elaborate wallpaper greets diners before they are led past the small, oak and stainless steel open-plan kitchen and into the dining room proper. In contrast, exposed Cornish stone at the far end of the restaurant acts as a feature wall, while Ercol tables and chairs – draped in sheepskin throws to provide a sense of hygge – add to the Scandinavian-inspired interior. A vinyl record player creates atmosphere thanks to the team's collection of classic sounds from artists including Pink Floyd and Brian Ferry.

The restaurant is open for dinner only on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, serving six to eight course and 10- to 12-course tasting menus at £65 or £95, respectively, while a multi-course, family-style Sunday lunch delivers exceptional value at £45 per head. A small-but-perfectly formed organic drinks list includes a wheat beer from the on-site micro-brewery, wines exclusively by the glass (such as Note di Rosso, a juicy Sicilian red from Alessandro Viola in Alcamo), a local cider from friends at Ripe Cider and a range of soft drinks.

Dining at Crocadon is an immersive experience and an educational one at that. Each course is brought to the table by the chefs with evangelical levels of enthusiasm as they describe the ingredients and their unrivalled provenance. A recent dish of "sheep, cylindra beetroot and bi-coloured shiso", for example, featured grilled and lightly roasted loin and leg meat from a six-year-old Blue Texel x Greyface Dartmoor, slow-cooked sheep's shoulder sat beneath wafer-thin beetroot slices steeped in shiso pickle, a beetroot purée, cooked down with some bi-coloured vinegar, chewy beets cooked, dried and rehydrated in their own juice, and a jus made from roasted sheep bones, beetroot and more shiso. The flavour is delicate and un-mutton-like, and as tender as a fillet steak.

"We take our sheep a lot older," explains Thompson, who worked with Cox at Fera. "We're trying to remove the stigma that mutton is strong. It's all about pasture – the more luscious pasture you give your animals, the more care you give your animals, the more delicious they are going to be at the end of it."

The road to zero waste

All the crockery used at Crocadon has been produced on-site, specifically in the centuries-old, six-bedroom farmhouse where Cox lives.

While an external building houses two kilns, many of the farmhouse's reception rooms have given way to the various stages of the ceramic-making process. A resident potter is occasionally on-site – some paid, some not – but a reasonable proportion of the crockery has been made by Cox and head chef Michael Thompson, with desserts recently served in the restaurant on a dish created by outgoing pastry chef Zak Poulot, who leaves at the end of October.

"Olivia Drew, a fine art degree graduate, came as a volunteer during the commercial vegetable growing days and is now a very skilled ceramicist," says Cox, adding that Drew has now set up her own pottery workshop.

Meat and fish bones (and trim) and scallop, crab and lobster shells are all used in the ceramics. They are separated, dried out and burned with the coppice wood or plants from the farm to create ashes that go into the ceramics in the form of the glaze or the body itself for bone china, having been mixed with Cornish clay or Cornish stone and feldspar. In addition, ashes are also returned to the land or the compost. Either way, waste in the restaurant is kept to an absolute minimum.

"As we're not entirely self-sufficient, it's inevitable that some things come in a little bit of packaging," explains Cox, who also buys vegetables from like-minded operator Gillyflower Farm in Lostwithiel, "but we don't have a bin in the kitchen – we have a two-litre container that sits underneath the countertop. Through positioning most stuff grown here and working with local suppliers in terms of vegetables, who deliver everything in reusable crates, we rarely see any packaging."

Cox admits there is a lot of plastic on the farm, such as the polytunnels, the silage tarp used to cover the ground (rather than ploughing it), two-litre ice-cream containers to keep ingredients in, and plastic garnish cubes used again and again. All, ultimately, recyclable.

"Bioplastics and compostable plastics are not a thing, in my opinion – some bioplastics on the market, deemed to be compostable, still have a petrochemical element in them. The worst part is the destructive agriculture and pesticides used to produce the plant-based element. We got sent a sample of compostable clingfilm recently, but it goes back to the same thing. We simply won't use clingfilm – in fact, anyone who does should be ashamed of themselves."