An ImMOOvable Feast - Aud's Dairy Diary, Part 1

Fresh-pulled, soft, warm, just-made mozzarella cheese is my new favorite food. When you bite into it, the salty water that hasn't all drained out yet squishes around in your mouth and the whole-milk cheese has a half-rubbery, half dough-y feel that squeaks deliciously on your teeth as you chew! Chew, chew... chew ...


{Photos: Ethereal views of the first-ever organic, hand-pulled mozzarella swirl I made on Thursday, captured digitally by cell-phone cam. Dan Apfel thinks it looks like bird poop but *I* think it looks delicious!}


This week marks my one-month anniversary as an unpaid intern at the Chapel Hill Creamery. After a stint clearing pasture and an afternoon of weighing cheeses on previous visits, this week I earned the privilege of participating in the mozzarella cheese-making ritual with two of Carrboro's most esteemed local organic dairy farmers /slash/ small artisanal cheese makers.

And I'll get to the cheesemaking description! I promise. It's all part of the reflection process (a requirement for my sustainable ag class, as well as a generally good idea). In this blog post, I'm aiming to describe my farm visits so far, structure the new knowledge I've gained, and reflect on the experiences.

Although I've only visited the farm four times now, I'm astounded at how much I've aleady picked up about the workings of the dairy. Flo and Portia, the owners, are not only hardworking farmers, skilled cheesemakers and savvy business women, but also enthusiastic teachers who love to talk about their cows!

Anna and Nadia - having much more farm experience than me, you are probably going to chuckle and think to yourselves, "yep! that's how it goes!..."

And Jess - I'm sure you'll love the breast-feeding aspect re: cow birthing :)



Week 1: Meeting the Farmers, Scoping the Farm

The first visit was simply an informal, "orientation" type of meeting. Flo and Portia met with me and the two undergrads who'd also be working there to discuss some of the basics. We sat around their kitchen table, which seemed to double as their conference table. The big back windows of their house overlook a creak 100 yards away, while their front windows allow them to keep an eye on everyone who comes and goes, as well as all the dairy activities, looking straight out to the barn, pastures and milking house no more than 50 or 60 feet away.

The Creamery had never had interns before us, so the owners, while enthusiastic about the opportunity, weren't quite sure what to do with us! But they were excited and wanted us to get hands on experience in all aspects of the combined farm and cheese-making operation. Additionally, they wanted us to realize that farmwork involves a combination of really repetitive, routine labor - e.g. feeding and milking the cows, making cheese for weekly delivery to distributors, and keeping the place generally tidy - combined with dealing with the irregular and the unpredictable occurrences - e.g. dealing with felled trees, broken machinery, and excitingly, delivering and caring for BABIES! (Cow babies.)

(Interpretation: Farm is like life.)

Other observations from that first brief visit include:

A) The farmers are really, really kind, warm, welcoming, and gentle - the kind of traits I expect from rural folk (which is a phrase I picked up down here).

B) The owners have somewhat specialized so that Portia is more of the "general manager"/dairy guru, while Flo is the "Big Cheese" (har har) in the cheesemaking/cheese-selling aspects of the enterprise.

Oh! Aaaaand, I was excited to demonstrate my minimal dairy knowledge by mentioning this recent study finding that cows with names produce more milk!

Biking home, I didn't yet realize just how much I would come to appreciate living DOWNHILL from the farm.



Week 2: Where Cows Go To Nap

Oh the blustery Carolina Piedmont. Cycling to the farm for my first real work day, I cursed the atmosphere under my breath for all five hilly miles of my journey. Why, wind!? Why must you blow in my face no matter which direction I travel. The road isn't the sea, I can't just set my sails close-hauled while my vessel does most of the work!

But eventually I arrived, just as the other two interns drove up and Portia came out to greet us. After she gave us a sort of knowledge-dump (details of which are described below), we moved on the the day's work - clearin' brush!

The brush-clearing was kind of awesome, because eventually it led to me just messing around for an hour on a ridiculous four-wheeler (my first, and possibly last time, but not for lack of amusement). In theory, we were clearing a path and also creating some little cow-sized resting nooks so that A) the farmers can access the electric fence for repairs, and B) in the summer, the cows can lay down in the shade of the overstory without getting poked by lower, udder-level shrubs.

At some point as we were working, it became obvious to the farmhand, Allison, that the clear and present need was for someone to run the four wheeler back and forth over the path as many times as possible to tamp it down. I quickly volunteered! Awesome! Here was a chance to try out one of those evil ATVs that every environmental org vitriolically lambasts when any sort of wild lands legislation is up for discussion!

I must admit, it was as expected: Loud, leading cause of erosion, smelled like icky diesel, clumsy to steer, plaything of rednecks ... but was also awesome - climbed over pretty much everything I wanted (stumps, rocks, inclines), was fun to straddle... Perhaps an ultimate combination of work and fun.


OK. Now for some details on the farm (i.e. Portia's knowledge dump):

Farm Overview

The Chapel Hill Creamery is somewhat unique for a small cheesemaking enterprise, in that the milk is produced on site. Many artisinal cheesemakers don't also raise cows, and many small organic dairy farmers don't make cheese for sale. The fact that the Creamery does BOTH, in my mind, puts this farm higher up the ladder of a holistic farm ecosystem - and I think Michael Pollan would agree.

Portia and Flo started the certified-organic operation around the year 2001 with just nine cows. Since then their herd has grown to about 45 cows as they breed their herd using an artificial insemination process. Being a dairy farm, they keep only females; any bull calves that are born are sold to a local organic meat producer, or on occasion slaughtered at the Creamery and eaten throughout the year.

Cow Food

The cows are pasture-fed. Although the cows do eat hay, too, they mostly eat grass. Portia described to us the ideal cycle to feed cows on pasture - when the grass is about 8-ish inches high (hands-measurement), the farmers will let the cows munch it down until it's about 3 inches high (another hands-measurement). Doing so is an ideal system because that top part of the grass has the most nutrients for the cow, and by having the cows eat down the grass to that not-quite-buzz-cut level, the grass maintains a healthy root system and can regenerate itself easily.

So the cows will be rotated through the pastures, depending on which pastures are ready for grazing, and when there is no appropriate pasture/during much of the winter, the cows are fed hay inside a two-sided barn.

Since the cows are pasture-raised, this also means they have softer ground to stand on than the animals kept on concrete flooring, resulting in far fewer foot (um, hoof) injuries which are apparently a big problem for cows in larger dairies.

Cow Babies

The Creamery has nine "lines" of cows on their farm - A through I. Each line is named after the original mother that started it, from the original herd of nine cows. Cows, like humans, will have a "due date" for their delivery but won't necessarily stick strictly to the schedule. Around the general time that a pregnant cow is due, the farmers will begin to watch for signs it's close to giving birth, such as the cow repeatedly raising its tail with no pooping, wetness around the birthing, uh, hole, and general restlessness.

When the farmers know that a cow is about to calf, the cow will be placed in a small fenced pen right in front of the farmhouse so all the employees can keep a close eye on it. Once the calf is born, they take it to a little pen with some blankets and feed it a large dose of colostrum (milk produced in the first few days after giving birth, with high nutrient content and special immune system benefits). The farmers also have to specially treat the mother, who is at a high risk for potentially fatal complications immediately after birth due to the loss of fluid and the other stresses on the body. So, yes - the cows are each given careful attention during this most joyous of times for any species.

However, SOMEtimes, a cow will go off into a pasture and have her baby in secret.

This, for example, was the story of the cow named Audrey. Supposedly, one day pregnant Andrea wandered off and didn't come home with the other cows in the evening. The next morning, the farmers noticed a group of cows all huddling around something in a far corner of the pasture. In the middle of the circle, they discovered a calf! Already 12 hours old, poor little shivering Audrey was rushed back to the barn and wrapped in a blanket and fed some colostrum and monitored. The little calf developed a high fever! She almost died! But then... miraculously, she bounced back, after scaring her human "parents" and creating a good story. She is now a full fledged adult cow and has her own babies down the A line.

My major takeaway from the day was the thrill of seeing a working model of the integrated organic pasture-raised cow farm described in my favorite chapter (Three) of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma.

After the hard day's work, I admit: I wimped out and caught a ride home, bike-in-trunk.

There's much more to tell about the milking and cheese rooms, but since this post is already so long, I'll hold off on those tales for another day!

Chew, chew... chew... over and out!