Last week Monforte held a meet and greet for local farmers. Our quest was to find suppliers for the milk we’ll need for our cheeses. We’ll start with sheep, water buffalo and mare’s milk. This last if we can find it.
We put an ad in farm paper luring potential suppliers to 49 Griffith Road with the promise of refreshments. We asked them to bring a chair. We’d heard getting farmers together is like herding cats; it can’t be done. So we had a pool going. Ruth was betting on 250 farmers showing up, Neville McNaughton our dairy consultant said 75 and I reserved judgment. By 7:15 p.m. we had 15 and counted that as pretty good.
Ruth welcomed everyone with little background on Monforte, especially our values. What impressed me most was hearing Ruth talk about how Monforte is a company built on relationships and how our relationship with farmers supplying our milk is no less important than our relationship with our CSA subscribers.
Neville described Monforte’s vision – to make the best cheese in North America. And in bringing that vision to life, we hope to help create a more sustainable agriculture, sustainable farms, good farm practices, protect and improve soil resulting in better nutrition and a healthier consumer.
And because all these things are embodied in raw milk cheese, our goal is to make raw cheese as well.
Some of the farmers at the meeting were conventional dairy farmers, others had once milked sheep and wanted to have a flock again, still others wanted their own herd but couldn’t afford it so they were milking someone else’s. We told them we were only interested in seasonal milk, that the females would have to suckle their young for a month before we started taking the milk, that we wanted the animals pasteur-fed and not grain-fed, that we wanted the animals to be raised humanely so they were calm enough to give their milk and not jabbed twice a day with oxytocin to let their milk down.
We also talked about disease and yield and organic vs conventional dairy farming.
It was hard to gauge the farmers’ reactions. One asked why on earth we didn’t want him to milk all year ‘round (we get this question a lot). Our answer is simple: it’s more natural, everyone, including farmers, is entitled to a rest; and it’s more economical to pasture feed the animals and then let them eat dried hay and grass in the winter and not feed them with high protein feed to keep their milk production high.
At the end of the after-meeting chat, Ruth had a plan to visit one farm which seemed to fit our criteria. She figures she may have to go farm to farm to find others, and she’ll do it too. We believe these farms are out there and we’ll find them.
And when the milk starts to flow in February or so, we’ll start making cheese.
