By Lorrie Baumann
Catalina bleats insistently from her pen in the Toluma Farms nursery barn as farmer Tamara Hicks approaches. Slender and long-haired, Hicks has the sun-kissed complexion of a woman who spends much of her time outdoors, and she doesn’t have the bottle that Catalina, a pure white Saanen kid born several weeks ago, is hoping for.
Like the other lambs and kids born this year at Toluma Farms, a 160-acre farm in west Marin County, California, Catalina is named after an island. There are also Kokomo, the island of the Beach Boys song; Floriana; and Manhattan – all bodies of land surrounded by water, a topic that’s very much on Californians’ minds. “We have often discussed the irony of being surrounded by water, being a coastal farm and dairy and worrying constantly about water,” Hicks says. “Hence, the islands seemed comical in a depressing sort of way.”
She and her husband, David Jablons, bought this farm in the rolling hills near Point Reyes in 2003 with the idea that they could become agents of change in the local food production system and in the debate about climate change. “We made a conscious decision that we could be part of the conversation about restoring the land,” Hicks says. They’ve sunk most of their children’s potential inheritance into this property, and now California is giving them a practical lesson in what the state’s climate means to the future of local food.
California is in its fourth year of a drought that’s setting records even for a state with a long history of concern for whether it has enough water to supply a burgeoning population and an agriculture industry that supplies most of the country’s fruits and vegetables. The period from 2012 through 2014 was the driest three-year period ever in terms of statewide precipitation; exacerbated by record warmth, with the highest statewide average temperatures ever recorded in 2014. Every California county has been included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s drought designations at various times between the beginning of 2012 and the end of 2014.
Unlike most other natural disasters, drought is a gradual crisis, occurring slowly over a period of time. There’s no sudden event that announces it, and it’s not usually ended by any one rain storm. The impacts of drought get worse the longer the drought continues, as reservoirs are depleted and water levels decline in groundwater basins.
Even though some parts of northern California did get a little rain last December and again in February of this year, the cumulative effect of four critically dry years has created a crisis that is expected to cost California’s agriculture industry $1.8 billion this year, with a total statewide economic cost of $2.7 billion. More than 18,000 jobs in the state’s agriculture industry are likely to be lost to the drought this year, according to agricultural economists studying the effects of the drought for the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Marin and Sonoma Counties have been the heart of northern California’s dairy industry since 1856, when Clara Steele made the first known batch of cheese in this part of the country from a recipe she found in a book. These are not the state’s most drought-stricken counties, but even here there’s a pervasive air of crisis. Marin County has declared a state of emergency so that farmers can qualify for any aid that becomes available. Local radio stations advertise water conservation tips and the availability of financial aid for water-saving devices. Farmers and gardeners hold evening meetings to share advice, offer each other fellowship and discuss the chances that this year’s drought might be California’s new normal, as Governor Jerry Brown said it is in April, as he imposed mandatory water use restrictions. Across California, the message is being passed that, “Brown is the new green,” as the state’s residents are urged to save water, save water, save water.
Hicks and Jablons take some solace in the knowledge that this property has a long history of having sufficient water. California’s most significant historical droughts have been a six-year drought in 1929-1934 – the Dust Bowl years, the two year-drought of 1976-77 – a comparatively short drought that nevertheless had very serious effects on the state’s groundwater, and another six-year drought in 1987-1992. The 1929-1934 drought was comparable to the most severe dry periods in more than a millennium of reconstructed climate data, but its effects were small by present-day standards because the state’s urban population and agricultural development are much greater now. In the 1970s drought, the family that owned Toluma Farms then had enough water to allow friends and neighbors to come and fill up tanks to truck back to their own farms. This time around, Hicks doesn’t feel secure enough to make that offer.
When they found this property, 18 miles west of Petaluma, in an area where they’d been coming for weekend camping excursions for years, it was a dilapidated farm with a history of dairy production that had been abandoned and the pastures neglected. Ten thousand old tires had been piled on a hillside in an ill-advised attempt to prevent the slope from eroding and were spilling down into the road. Other discarded junk had been dumped around the house or buried in backhoed pits.
Neither Hicks nor Jablons had any experience in farming – Hicks is a clinical psychologist and Jablons is a surgeon, both with busy practices in San Francisco – but they felt that their financial resources, their skills in forming and maintaining helpful relationships with other people and their commitment to their values could see them through the challenges of returning the farm to its historic use as a productive dairy farm. “It’s a good thing that we are both equally committed to the idea of restoring the farm to health and making a statement about the value of sustainable agriculture and a healthy food system,” Hicks says. Otherwise, she adds, their marriage might not have survived the challenges of figuring out how to turn derelict pastures and an ad hoc landfill into a financially and ecologically sustainable family farm. After more than a decade of work with the Natural Resources Conservation Service to rehabilitate the pastures, hauling away the tires and other garbage, building a guesthouse that’s rented out for in-depth educational farm stays and meeting space, and opening a creamery for making cheese, the farm hasn’t yet fulfilled that dream of sustainability. Hicks is hopeful that the artisan cheeses from the Tomales Farmstead Creamery she opened on the property in 2013 will be the final piece in a patchwork of enterprises the couple operates to support the farm, but returning the land to health will probably take a few more decades, she estimates. “We’re not profitable yet,” she says. “I’m not sure if it’s possible to make a living as farmstead cheese producers.”
Toluma Farms gets its water from sidehill wells that just have to last until the drought ends because the farm can’t support the costs of trucking in water, even if the water was available at all, which it probably wouldn’t be. “We kind of hope and pray,” Hicks says. “The city [of Petaluma, the nearest municipal water system] has pulled way back in prioritizing water for agriculture. Houses out here can’t even get water.”
Coming to terms with the drought has meant cutting back the milking schedule to once per day instead of the usual twice-daily milkings at 12-hour intervals, which saves half the water normally used to clean the milking parlor but reduces milk production by 25 percent. State and federal regulations require that the equipment used in milking must be sanitized before every milking and then washed immediately after use, both to protect the milk from contamination and to protect the health of the animals, and all of this cleaning is a major use of water on dairy farms.
Tomales Farmstead Creamery makes and sells five cheeses made from the milk of its herd of 200 goats and more than 100 East Friesian sheep. The cheeses all have names that reflect the heritage of the coastal Miwok Indians who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Kenne is a soft-ripened goat cheese with a wrinkly Geotrichum rind that’s aged for three weeks. Teleeka is a soft-ripened cheese made with goat, sheep and Jersey cow milk – the only one in the collection that’s not a farmstead cheese, since the Jersey milk comes from Marissa Thornton’s dairy farm just down the road. Assa, a word that means “female” is an aged goat cheese with a chardonnay-washed rind. The name is a tribute to the many women who work on the farm as well as the female animals that produce the milk. Liwa is a fresh goat cheese aged just three days – the name means “water.” “We pray for water,” Hicks says. Atika is an aged sheep and goat cheese with a McEvoy Olive Oil rind. Atika won a second-place award from the American Cheese Society in 2014, in the creamery’s first time to enter the awards contest.
All five cheeses are made with pasteurized milk, since the creamery doesn’t have the space to isolate pasteurized milk cheeses from raw milk varieties. Hicks is glad now that the couple made an early decision not to make raw milk cheeses because she’s noticed that the makers of raw milk cheeses are getting extra scrutiny this year from food safety inspectors. While there are raw milk cheesemakers who believe that pasteurization could compromise the complexity of the flavors in their cheeses, Hicks is satisfied that the production method she has chosen produces an excellent product. “We think it’s delicious cheese, or we wouldn’t do what we do,” she says.
Two years ago, Jablons and Hicks started growing their own hay using dry-land farming techniques, by planting 40 acres with a mixture of oats, rye and barley that yielded one cutting last year and a second cutting this year. That’s easing some of the effects of the drought on the farm, since it insulates the couple from the extra costs of buying hay in a market in which the supply/demand ratio has been affected by decreased production from farmers who haven’t had enough water to irrigate their hay fields. “We still have to supplement some, but not nearly what we had had to do,” Hicks says. “With the drought, we’re paying twice as much now as we did 10 years ago. It’s now $300 a ton, and the quality is not as good…. We know people who’ve had to get rid of their cattle. Fortunately, sheep and goats don’t drink as much water.”
She’s grateful for the coastal fog that blankets the hillsides of her farm in the mornings and shelters the fields from the evaporative power of the sun’s heat. “I don’t know how the farmers around Modesto are doing it,” she says. “The weather is so much hotter there.”
Next: Drought Adds to the Pain of a Bleating Heart
Drought Adds to the Pain of a Bleating Heart
Down the road a few miles, at Bleating Heart Cheese, Hicks’ friend and fellow cheese maker Seana Doughty is also feeling the effects of the drought, even though she owns no dairy animals. She buys all the milk she uses to make her American Originals cheeses from local farmers, and the farmer who usually supplies her with most of her sheep milk won’t be able the supply the same quantity she has in the past. This year, almost half of her ewes didn’t get pregnant. Since they didn’t get pregnant, they won’t be producing milk this year. It’ll be another year before they’re in season to breed again, so this year’s failure means the loss of a year’s milk production from those sheep – and a sizable hole in the farmer’s bank account.
The dairy farmer blames her mature dairy ewes’ failure to become pregnant on the drought, which seems to have changed the normal proportions of the plant species in the sheep’s pastures, Doughty says. “The dairy operator, on further research, found that when you have an overabundance of clover in the pasture, it can disrupt the ewes’ breeding cycle. What happened in the pasture that they had their ewes on during their ‘maternity leave’ was that they had much more clover than usual. This wasn’t obvious at the time – it was only when the ewes didn’t get pregnant that the situation became clear. We have no proof, but the evidence is there,” she explains.
For Doughty, it means that the milk that would have been produced by the ewes that failed to breed won’t be coming into her creamery. “That equates to a little over $50,000 of unrealized revenue to us,” she says. For the past two years, she has been making award-winning cheeses in the creamery she and her husband built in the former milk room of the Thornton Ranch with some financial help from a loan from Whole Foods Market. “Our bank turned us down twice, but Whole Foods came through,” she says. For the four years prior to that, she and her husband had been roving cheese makers, making their cheeses in rented facilities. “Cheese making is one of the most capital-intensive businesses you can get into because of the expense of the equipment, the investment in milk. Year two, all of a sudden we’re down 40 percent. Not having that revenue is an issue,” she says. “What we’re having to do now is rethink our production schedule for the rest of the year because we don’t have as much sheep milk as we had expected. We’re looking to source other milk. Sheep milk is almost impossible to get if you don’t have a contract. We’re probably going to process more cow milk, and we’re also thinking about talking to our friend [Andrew Zlot] who has water buffalo [at the Double 8 Dairy, one of only a few water buffalo dairies in North America]. He makes gelato in the summer, but in the winter, he may have surplus.”
Finding other milk so she can continue to fill her aging rooms is a financial necessity for Doughty, who’s in a hole because she and her husband recalled all of their 2014 production from the market last December after the federal Food and Drug Administration found Listeria monocytogenes in samples of the creamery’s cheeses. Listeria is a virulent foodborne pathogen that causes about 1,600 illnesses and 260 deaths a year in the United States, including one person killed and several hospitalized across five states during a 2013 outbreak linked to farmstead cheese. The microbe is widespread in the environment, and is commonly found around humans, domestic animals, raw agricultural commodities and in food processing environments, especially cool, damp areas, according to the FDA. While common elsewhere, the microbe is not welcome either in processed food that’s intended to be eaten without further cooking once it’s sold or on any surface that comes into contact with the food before it’s sold. Detection of Listeria in lab testing is sufficient to cause the FDA to declare the entire batch of food from which the sample was taken to be adulterated and therefore unfit for sale, whether anyone gets sick from eating it or not. “We had been testing. Our lab reports said everything was fine,” Doughty says. “Then the FDA collected samples and didn’t report the information to us for nearly three months. The consequence of that was that we had to recall our entire 2014 cheese production, which ended up costing us about $200,000.”
The contaminated cheeses found at Bleating Heart resulted in no reported illnesses but dealt a nearly fatal blow to the creamery’s business. “A lot of people expected the business to shut down,” Doughty says. “For a company of our size, it was truly devastating. It was emotionally devastating because we try so hard to be conscientious. We take food safety very seriously. It was almost unfathomable. I was having panic attacks every day. I couldn’t believe this was happening to us. And then the money part. In the beginning, it was disbelief, and then the financial reality started to set in. It was like looking over the edge of a cliff. It was like the Grim Reaper had come. It was literally a life and death situation for our company.”
After extensive testing and a thorough cleaning, as well as a complete reevaluation of their production process, Doughty and her husband cashed in their retirement funds and sank the money into a new oven in which their aging boards are now heat-treated between each batch of cheese, new laundry facilities to clean the new color-coded uniforms that the staff changes into and out of each time they enter the production room and the aging rooms, wages for the small staff and a new supply of milk to restart operations. “We truly believe in the future of the company, and we truly believe in the cheeses we’re making. Quitting just wasn’t an option. There’s no way I’m going to be defeated by the L-word, Listeria,” Doughty says. “We can’t afford any more setbacks, period, small or large, but we truly are committed to making a great product and a safe product, and if we didn’t think we could, we wouldn’t have made such an investment.”
Bleating Heart Cheese was allowed to go back into production in January of this year after the FDA wrapped up its investigation. The source of the contamination was never pinpointed, but Doughty believes that it came from the brushes that she and her staff use to wash the rinds of their cheeses. “How the listeria got into the brushes we never found out,” she says. Today, those brushes are sanitized and heat-treated after every use.
Despite her respect for the courteous and professional treatment she received from the FDA inspectors who spent days swabbing down her creamery during their investigation, the three-month delay between the time the FDA showed up to take the first samples and when the lab results were reported back to Doughty has left a bad taste in her mouth. “We never got any explanation about why there was such a delay between the time they detected the Listeria and when they called us. We emailed them repeatedly asking for a copy of the lab report. They kept telling us they didn’t have it,” she says. “If they had told us in a timely manner, we would have immediately suspended cheese production until finding out what happened. It would have saved us a lot of grief and a lot of money. And what would have happened if someone got sick in the interim? Fortunately, no one got sick, and that’s the important thing. Thank goodness. But what if someone had?”
Bleating Heart is best known for its first cheese, Fat Bottom Girl, named for a Queen song in which it’s claimed that, “Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round.” Fat Bottom Girl won a first-place award in the American Originals category at this year’s American Cheese Society awards.
“While the recipe was no accident, the shape [of the first batch of Fat Bottom Girl] was, because I was a newbie and took the cheeses out of the form too early,” Doughty says. Fat Bottom Girl is a raw sheep milk cheese with a lightly washed rind that’s aged for three to four months. Bleating Heart’s other cheeses include Ewelicious Blue, a raw sheep milk blue cheese with a natural rind that’s aged three to four months and its sister, Moolicious Blue, a similar cheese made with raw Jersey cow milk. Buff Blue is a blue cheese made from raw water buffalo milk with a natural rind that’s aged for three to four months. There’s a mixed milk cheese called Foursquare, which is made with cow, sheep, buffalo and goat milk; Shepherdista, a sheep milk cheese with a rustic natural rind, and Funky Bleats, which is a washed rind cheese made from a blend of sheep and goat milk. A few other cheeses are made intermittently, depending on the supply of available milk. The cheese is sold primarily in specialty retailers in California, but occasionally, it makes it out of the state as people call and order it from the creamery’s distributors, and Bleating Heart’s online store will be open before the end of this year.
Next: Making Cheese to Carry on a Family Tradition
Making Cheese to Carry on a Family Tradition
“Of all the people here when we started out, the Lafranchi family was the most gracious about offering help,” Tamara Hicks said as she thought back over her years at Toluma Farms. “They just said, ‘Anything at all that you need.’ They’re just the most wonderful people.” The Lafranchi family runs the Lafranchi Ranch and Nicasio Valley Cheese about 28 miles from both Bleating Heart Cheese and Toluma Farms as the road runs, and standing in the small shop that the creamery operates on the property, Rick Lafranchi has nothing but respect for Seana Doughty. “She was going gangbusters. She won a double Best of Show at the California State Fair,” he says. “She was killing it.” Lafranchi is tall and muscular, a third-generation dairy farmer with a mop of sandy hair going gray and the clear-eyed, steady gaze of a survivor. He looks like a man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
He points out that Doughty is part of the dairy tradition that began in the Point Reyes area in the mid-1850s. Those dairy pioneers included three Steele brothers George, Isaac and Edgar Steele and their cousin Rensselaer Steele who came to Sonoma County separately from their home state of Ohio. George and Rensselaer arrived in 1855. Within a year, they had found a farm to rent at Two Rock near Petaluma and were joined in June of 1856 by George’s parents, brother Edgar and Rensselaer’s family. Edgar found work harvesting oats and used his wages to buy his first five cows. It was Rensselaer’s wife Clara who made that first cheese. Inspired by the successful experimentation with cheesemaking, the Steeles expanded their small dairy business with another 25 dairy cows. In 1863, one of Edgar Steele’s dairy manager told him that he was milking about 55 cows and making 180 pounds of cheese per day, and while he wasn’t sure that Steele would approve of the wages he was paying to his workers, he thought that a good milker was worth the $30 a month he was paying for an experienced hand was cheaper than the $25 he’d pay a green hand for less skilled work.
The Steeles gained national fame in 1864 when they produced a “monstrous” cheese at their southern dairies measuring 20 feet around and weighing 33,850 pounds, to benefit the Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross, according to D.S. Livingston, the historian of the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1993, when he compiled a history of “Ranching on the Point Reyes Peninsula” for the National Park Service. The Steele brothers, Carlisle S. Abbott, Rufus T. Buell, Charles Laird and others went from their operations in Marin County, which had become known as San Francisco’s milk pail, to other areas of the state, where they became some of the leading dairy producers in the state that now tops all others in dairy production.
Lafranchi’s family arrived in Nicasio Valley, about nine miles east of Point Reyes Station, after his grandfather Fredolino immigrated from Maggia, a tiny farming village in Switzerland that’s about 81 miles north-northwest of Milan, Italy. He made his way to Nicasio Valley, married Zelma Dolcini, and started the Lafranchi Dairy in 1919. Fred and Zelma raised their children on the ranch, and eventually their son Will, Rick’s father, took over the operation. It was Will who first thought about making cheeses after meeting a cheese maker from the same Swiss village his father had left, but the family was busy at the time, just trying to make a living in the face of boom and bust prices for fluid milk, and nothing came of the idea at the time. Then Will passed away in 2002, and the family began taking another look at the idea. “We knew we wanted to position the ranch to be sustainable in the long term,” Lafranchi says. “We started pursuing the idea of a value-added product.”
The dairy industry has been successful in this area because it has a longer-than-average growing season for the pastures that feed the cows, and that was critical to early production. Over the past 30 years, it’s gotten more challenging as milk prices have careened wildly up and down in response to supply and demand pressures. Dairy farmers like Lafranchi began to look for a way to survive boom and bust milk prices and found two: the market for organic milk, for which dairy farmers are paid a premium price, and making artisanal cheese, which is sold at prices that reflect its value to consumers. In 1996, there were three cheese makers in the north Bay Area, and new creameries began popping up around that time. “What they were drawing on was the strength of the region to produce high-quality milk, and we thought we could do that,” Lafranchi says.
By 2006, the Lafranchi Dairy had already started transitioning to organic milk production, which got the dairy off the milk price roller coaster but still didn’t produce enough revenue to give the family confidence that the farm was sustainable enough to support another generation of the family. “If there is a positive in organic milk production, it’s that the price you get for your milk reflects, so far, more accurately the price of producing that milk, whereas with conventional milk, it’s often a case of supply and demand,” Lafranchi says.
Cheese offered a window of hope, and the Lafranchi family gave the California Department of Agriculture a call to ask for help designing a cheese plant that would pass inspection. That close cooperation resulted in a facility designed to the latest safety standards that could be built for a lower cost than the family’s original design ideas, Lafranchi says. “He actually helped us save money…. What we found was that by working as closely as possible with government agencies, we were saved a lot of headaches,” he says. “You have to be more careful than you think careful is.”
With the creamery built, Lafranchi began diverting a percentage of the milk from the farm’s 450 cows to making cheese in 2010. Today, Nicasio Valley Cheese is California’s only farmstead producer of organic cow milk cheeses, with eight cheeses ranging from fresh to bloomy rinds to washed rinds to cheeses in Alpine and Taleggio style that all reflect the family heritage from Maggia. Foggy Morning is an American Cheese Society award-winning fresh cheese that’s soft with a tang that gives it a long finish on the palate. Foggy Morning with Basil & Garlic has a pop of organic basil and a subtle garlic note infused into Foggy Morning for a cheese that appeals even to those who don’t normally favor flavored cheeses.
Formagella, made in 3-inch rounds with a velvety white exterior, is a mild aged cheese similar to a Brie, while Halleck Creek is a very similar cheese made in 8-inch wheels. Loma Alta is another soft-ripened cheese that’s very similar to Formagella but has a more defined rind. It’s a two-time award winner at the American Cheese Society’s annual competition.
Nicasio Reserve is a classic Swiss-Italian Alpine-style cheese aged at least three months. It’s a three-time gold medal winner at the California State Fair.
Nicasio Square is a washed-rind cheese with a golden rind and a flavor reminiscent of a Taleggio cheese. It’s won awards at state, national and Good Food Award competitions. San Geronimo, also a washed-rind cheese, is the creamery’s newest product. Recently San Geronimo was awarded second place at the American Cheese Society’s annual competition in the raclette category.
In the five years since the creamery started making cheese, Nicasio Valley’s sales have increased year over year every year, in spite of a dramatic increase in the number of specialty cheesemakers in northern California, all depending on the strength of the San Francisco market for high-quality food. “The number of labels has grown rapidly, and it’s really challenged the American public to experience all these cheeses,” Lafranchi says. “Since we started, the number of cheesemakers has doubled.”
Despite the competition, Lafranchi is optimistic about the future of his company and his cheeses. “Little kids absolutely love artisan cheese – and it doesn’t have to be the mild ones. They like the strong ones too. I think the future’s really bright for artisan cheeses in the U.S.”
Assuming that Lafranchi’s optimism is justified by the market and the farm can stand the extra cost of buying feed in a market dramatically affected by this year’s drought, there’s a fourth generation of the Lafranchi family that would like to come back to the farm, and Lafranchi is hoping that he’ll be able to offer them the chance to do that. “If the opportunity was afforded to them, they could very well act,” he says. “Hopefully, the model will be valuable enough that it will be as attractive as many other careers could be.”
Next: In Pursuit of Sustainability at Redwood Hill Farm
In Pursuit of Sustainability at Redwood Hill Farm
Jennifer Bice is the kind of grandmother who would sneak you a cookie if you asked, but it would probably be an oatmeal cookie, and she’d make you sit down at the table to eat it with a big glass of milk. In her case, that would be a big glass of goat milk from the herd of Nubian, Saanen, Alpine and La Mancha dairy goats that live on the farm right outside the doors of her home, which was once the farm’s cheese room. She’s the owner and cheesemaker at Redwood Hill Farm & Creamery, which makes Redwood Hill artisan cheeses, yogurt and kefir and Green Valley Organics lactose-free cow milk products. The oldest of a family of 10 children, she was born in Los Angeles and moved to Sebastopol with her parents when she was 10 years old. “Because we were now in the country and had no kids to play with, they got us animals,” she says. Of all the barnyard pets who came to live with the family, goats quickly became favorites because they were so smart. “Each of us had five or six or eight goats,” she says. “That added up to a herd very quickly.”
This was in the late 1960s, a time when young people were coming back to the land and “health food stores” were opening across the country. The health food stores offered a ready market for goat milk, and Bice’s parents seized the opportunity to develop a Grade A goat dairy to supply them. In those days, health food stores were the only ones interested in goat milk, but in the time since then, health food stores have become natural food stores and goat milk products are in sufficient demand to give them a place in the dairy cases of conventional groceries. “It’s gratifying to see that changed in my lifetime,” Bice says.
She and her late husband took the farm and Grade A dairy operation over from her parents in 1978, just as goat cheeses were starting to get popular, and they started making cheeses as a way to even out the creamery’s income over the year. Goat milk is a seasonal product – the Redwood Hill Farm goats kid at the beginning of the year, make milk through the spring and summer, tapering off in the fall, and then rest for two months before they kid again. The creamery’s milk supply naturally dried up when the goats did, and the Bices decided to make cheeses that they could sell for an income even when the goats weren’t producing. “Milk lasts for seven days, whereas cheese you can age for years,” Jennifer says. “We weren’t thinking too clearly, because my favorite cheeses are the chèvre and the rind-ripened ones, and they tend not to have the longest shelf life…. I tend to make what I like to eat.”
If the milk has been produced in a sanitary way, the consumer can’t necessarily tell the difference between a cow milk cheese and a goat milk cheese. Goat milk has short-chain fatty acids that make it a more delicate milk, and if it’s abused – even agitated too much – its those short-chain fatty acids that break down and make for barny flavors. The small fat globules in the milk account for the natural homogenization of goat milk – its fat doesn’t rise to the top of the milk the way that cream naturally separates from cow milk – and also make the milk easier for humans to digest.
In Europe, most of the farms that produce goat milk cheeses belong to distinct traditions, in which a given farm will make one, and only one, kind of cheese from a traditional recipe. Most of those goat cheeses are small format cheeses made with a lactic fermentation that really shows off the milk. Instead of offering different varieties of cheese for sale, the farmers often sell their single variety at different ages, with cheeses like a crottin, for instance, going to market when it’s fresh to a year old. Most Americans prefer softer and fresher cheeses like the Bucheret. “I like it in between, where when you cut it, it kind of cracks and then you can melt it on your tongue,” Bice says.
Chèvre was the first goat cheese to achieve popularity in the U.S. “The chefs are to be thanked for promoting goat cheese,” says Bice. Once people started tasting goat cheese in expensive restaurants, the glamour associated with those fabled eateries rubbed off, and consumers began looking for it in their grocery stores. Today, chèvre is a staple of American cuisine and is widely used as a pizza topping, as an ingredient in cheesecakes and for stuffing chicken breasts. “Even today, that’s our biggest poundage sold because it is so versatile,” she says.
Redwood Hill Farm makes chèvre the traditional way, with a long 18-hour lactic culture and then draining in cheesecloth bags for 48 hours with no pressure, which makes a cheese with a light, fluffy texture. It’s packaged for sale in plastic tubs that preserve the texture rather than the Cryovac plastic in which commercial chèvre is packaged for a longer shelf life. “It’s easier to take on a picnic [in the tubs],” Bice says.
Redwood Hill Farm’s California Crottin and Terra are both ripened with a Geotrichum rind – Terra in a 5-ounce round and the California Crottin in a 3-ounce round. The different size of the two cheeses makes for a distinctly different flavor profile as they ripen.
Cameo is a seasonal cheese made in a Camembert style with spring and fall milk that’s high in butterfat, which makes it soften to a voluptuous creaminess. Seasonality is hard to do in the U.S., where consumers and chefs are accustomed to being able to find whatever they want to eat whenever they want it, but Bice is now finding that people are learning to accept the wait when the cheese is not available and getting excited about seeing it come back onto the market in its season. Much of the fresh chèvre is being made with milk from the farm, but the harder cheeses, such as Cheddar and feta, are made using a blend of milk from Redwood Hill Farm with milk produced from neighboring farms. The hard cheeses are made during the six months of the year when there’s a surplus of milk on the market and then sold year-round.
Over time, Redwood Hill Farm added cultured milk products – yogurt and kefir – which today account for the bulk of the creamery’s production. After goat milk cheeses became popular, consumers, especially the adventurous Millennials, were drawn to the yogurt as well. “Thankfully, our business continues to grow,” Bice says. “We pride ourselves on having the best-tasting goat products.”
Redwood Hill currently has about 72 employees, including six on the farm and a few marketing representatives who work outside the facility, leaving about 60 at the creamery working in the office, on the sanitation teams, making yogurt and kefir and seven employees specifically making cheeses.
The creamery started making lactose-free products under the Green Valley Organics brand name a few years ago with organic cow milk from local farms. “We try to make dairy that everyone can enjoy,” Bice notes.
None of the artisan cheeses are currently made with cow milk, although Bice is thinking about possibly doing some cheeses with a blend of cow milk and goat milk in the future. For now, that’s just an idea and some experiments. Bice feels that even though cheesemaking is a tradition that’s thousands of years old, there’s still plenty of room for creativity.
Over the years, she’s seen a wide range of new cheeses come to be judged at the American Cheese Society meetings. While most are traditional flavors, cheesemakers are doing lots of experiments with different rind rubs for cheddars, for instance. Cheese has always been a product of varying flavors, since even in early times when farmers were taking their goats to the mountains in the summer and making their cheeses in a pot over an open fire, the cheesemakers didn’t have control over the environmental factors influencing the cheeses, and it only takes small changes in how they’re produced to make significant differences in the taste of a cheese.
Cheeses continue to grow in popularity, and Americans’ tastes in cheese continue to evolve as their interest grows. “It’s an exciting time to be a cheesemaker,” Bice says. “I love my business…. It’s nice to be able to have a business and decide things based on your own values.”
Bice has never run her business in a fashion that would generate the highest possible profits; she runs it to make a reasonable profit and to exemplify her own ethical values. She provides a competitive wage and good benefits to her employees, including full health insurance for employees and their families. She has invested in solar arrays that now provide all of the power for the farm and 85 percent of the creamery’s needs, and the creamery’s water conservation efforts include storage tanks that capture natural water when it’s available and a water reclamation system that allows water to be reused a few times before it leaves the creamery for a treatment plant and eventually is used to water a hay crop. Redwood Hill Farm was the first Certified Humane goat dairy in the country, and today, all of the farms that supply milk to the creamery are Certified Humane. “We’re trying to be sustainable where we can and trying to make a difference,” Bice says.
Rima, a national champion Alpine goat, seemed happy to hop up onto the milking stanchion for a snack of dairy ration offered by Bice’s youngest brother Scott, the farm manager at Redwood Hill Farm, to demonstrate milking. Her national championship, like those of many of the other goats on the farm, means that her kids, even the males, are highly valued, and the sale of kids and frozen semen from the Redwood Hill Farm herd adds a significant sum to the farm’s revenues. Once she’s past her milking days, at about 10 years of age, she’ll be retired to live out the rest of her life on the farm. “We figure that once they’ve worked all those years for us, we should give them the rest of their lives,” Scott says.
Like every other farmer in the area, he is worried about the effects of drought. The farm has wells in shallow springs, and so far the water is holding, but he buys about 120 tons of hay a year to feed the 300 goats on the farm. Some of it comes from as far away as western Nevada, where farmers also had less water for their crops because they too depend on the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which was nearly nonexistent this year, so the cost of that hay is rising. Scott is dealing with that issue with an experiment in growing tagasaste, a drought-tolerant shrub from New Zealand that’s grown there for animal forage. It’s a nitrogen-fixing shrub that’s highly regarded for its ability to sequester carbon, and it doesn’t need to be watered once it’s established because it actually grows two sets of roots – deep roots that pump water up into the tree from the groundwater and another set of shallow roots that absorb nutrients to feed the tree. It can be cut for forage that the goats love, and then it resprouts and grows again. It’s performance on test acreage has convinced Scott to plant more in the future, and if the experiment succeeds, tagasaste can be an important feedstock for Redwood Hill Farm that won’t need to be irrigated.
Next: Dry Acres at Fiscalini Farms
Dry Acres at Fiscalini Farms
It is Brian Fiscalini’s one intention to take good care of the legacy left by his great-grandfather, a Swiss immigrant who started the family farm outside Modesto, California in 1914 with 12 Holstein cows. Square-jawed and broad-shouldered, with blond hair and an engaging grin, Fiscalini has the look that would get his headshot sent down from central casting to a movie director who needed a farmer for his film – if Hollywood still made movies about salt-of the-Earth people who grow food for a living. Each generation of his family has grown the farm in a different way. Brian’s father John added to the farm by building a cheese plant in 2000. John is now semi-retired, and Brian and his sister Laura, who run the farm today, are planning the contribution that they’ll make to that legacy. “We really do try as hard as we can to take care of our people, take care of our cows, and take care of our environment – the land. Sustainability is not a word that can be used just about environmental practices. It has to do with the culture that’s created here,” he says. “There are still two employees here that my grandfather hired, and he’s been gone for 22 years. One of those employees has two of his children working here. I like to see that. I like to see that there are people who see the job their father does and understand that it’s an important job, and they want to follow in his footsteps, and they want to be associated with our company and the things we stand for.”
About 10 percent of the milk produced on the farm is used to make 1,400 pounds of cheese a day, five days a week, under the direction of Mariano Gonzalez, who made cheese on his family’s farm in Paraguay as a child, then came to the United States and made cheese at Shelburne Farms in Vermont. He started working for Fiscalini in 2001. “A giant weight was lifted off my father’s shoulders – he was always asking how he was going to make phenomenal award-winning cheese with no practical cheesemaking experience,” Brian says. “Mariano is still here. He’s teaching a new generation of cheesemakers. He has five cheesemakers working for him, and he is teaching them his trade, the art – and it truly is an art. You can’t just take great milk and turn it into great cheese. We are really hoping that the next generation of Fiscalini cheesemakers are taking that job seriously and understanding that they really are learning from a world-renowned master cheesemaker – that they’ll also eventually have the chance to create their own cheeses so that they can have their name associated with our products.”
Those products include Fiscalini’s San Joaquin Gold, an American Original cheese made in 32-pound wheels and aged 12 months. Lionza is named after the Swiss village from which the family emigrated to the United States. It’s a traditional Swiss-style cheese with a semi-soft texture and irregular eyes. Fiscalini Bandage-Wrapped Cheddar has three times been named the world’s best cheddar at the World Cheese Awards and is the only American cheddar to win the award.
The milk that doesn’t go to make cheese is currently sold to Nestle, which has a plant in Modesto and uses the Fiscalini milk to make evaporated and condensed milk under the Carnation label. Fiscalini hopes that sometime in the next few years, that milk will instead be used to make value-added dairy products – either cheese or ice cream – right on the farm. “When you are in the business of making milk you are going to sell to somebody else, there are sometimes very bad years for milk prices when farmers can lose a large amount of money in a very short amount of time. When we’re allowing someone else to set our prices, we lose control,” Fiscalini says. “When we have the cheese business, we make our own prices. We can decide to sell our cheese at a reasonable but profitable price…. We can become price makers instead of price takers.”
This year, the drought has challenged that dream. “In typical years, used to hose the driveways down to clean them off, with the water running into the field. In the past four months, we’ve been blowing them off with leaf blowers instead of using water,” Fiscalini says. “I don’t know how much water we’ve saved by doing that. I just felt that it’s the right thing to do. When neighbors drive by, they see that we care, that we’re not just sprinkling water on the driveway when there’s an alternative we can do to keep the facility clean.”
Fiscalini pumps the water used to clean the dairy from California’s groundwater supply, which has diminished during the four-year drought. According to the California Department of Water Resources, reduced surface water availability during 2014 caused many farmers to make up some of the shortage by increasing their pumping from their irrigation wells, which dropped groundwater levels in many parts of the state 50 to 100 feet below their historical lows.
Water is used to hose down the stalls and the lanes along which the cows walk as they parade into and out of the milking parlor three times a day, then recycled along with the water used to flush the lines from the milking machines and used again two or three more times before it’s finally delivered to a lagoon that stores it until it’s pumped onto the fields to water 470 acres of feed crops. “Even if we had all the water in the world – we’ve been practicing this for 20 years. It was done just because we thought it was the right thing to do. We’ve always believed in saving water and using resources responsibly. It’s what my grandfather did, and it’s in my blood,” Fiscalini says. “Over the past three to four years, we were looking into technologies that could take lagoon water and treat it so it could be returned for potable water uses. All of them have been so expensive relative to the cost of pumping water out of the wells that they’ve been cost-prohibitive. I really hope that in the coming years – I’m hoping less than five – that someone can come up with a technology that is cost-effective so farmers can reuse the water we have and get it to a potable state. As long as it could be used for wash-down cycles or any other use that didn’t require drinking water quality, it would be what we need. I think it would save a huge amount of water in our daily practices.”
In years when he has enough water to irrigate them, Fiscalini grows three crops a year to minimize the amount of feed he has to buy from other farmers. In the summer he grows corn for silage – vegetable matter that’s fed to animals without drying it; in the winter he grows wheat that’s either chopped for silage or bailed for hay, depending on weather; and in the spring he grows Sudan grass that’s either chopped or bailed before being fed to his cows. Most of his irrigation water comes from the Modesto Irrigation District, which stores snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountains and rainfall in northern California reservoirs and delivers the water to Fiscalini through two canals that run through the property. In a normal year, Fiscalini gets an allotment of 24 inches per acre. Last year, it was 20 inches, and this year, it was down to 16 inches. “If we hit 100 percent of our allotment, they’ll cut us off,” Fiscalini says.
He expects to use the last of this year’s water allotment during corn season, so he’ll be fallowing half his acreage during Sudan grass season, which means he’ll have to supplement his home-grown feed with purchased forage that will affect his production costs significantly, since the cost of feed accounts for about 50 to 60 percent of the cost to produce milk. “This will be the first time in 20 years that we’ve ever had to do that. The value of that Sudan grass as a hay is about $170 per ton; as a silage it’s about $45 per ton. If we do hay, we can get 1.5 to 2 tons per acre; for silage, we get 10-12 tons per acre,” he says. “If we’re going to forego 200 or more acres, that’s $60,000 for hay that we will now have to go out and purchase for the cows rather than growing it ourselves. For silage, that would be $116,325 worth of silage that we will not be able to grow and that we will have to purchase from a neighbor or make up for it with different ingredients. The drought will inevitably increase our cost of feed to the animals just because we can’t grow the feed ourselves.”
Across the state, an estimated 565,000 acres were fallowed this year, almost all of it in California’s Central Valley, and abnormally high forage prices are causing California dairy farmers to cull their herds, resulting in less milk on the market, according to state agricultural economists who estimate a $250 million loss to California’s economy due to these factors alone.
The canals that irrigate the Fiscalini Farms forage crops are higher than the fields around them, and as the water flows through them, it spills over the banks of the canals and out onto the fields. The practice is known as flood irrigation, and it puts Fiscalini and his farm in the midst of a controversy about whether California’s farmers deserve the water they use.
Flood irrigation is frequently criticized, even by other farmers, as wasteful and inefficient because all of the water that pours onto the fields isn’t taken up by crops. “Flood irrigation uses a significant amount of water, but it’s also very important for flood irrigation to continue to be used because it replenishes the aquifer. We have looked into other irrigation systems said to conserve water, but they don’t do a very good job of replenishing the aquifer. That is a challenge that we are looking into – how do we tackle that challenge?” Fiscalini says. “We’re walking a fine line. We’re trying to do what we feel is the best thing, not only for our farms and our animals and our livelihood, but for California as a whole. We’re trying to take a community approach.”
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