Tim making Fortsonia

At this point, we make three styles of raw milk cheeses. As a result, they all have to be aged for at least 60 days before sale.  One is a bloomy rind cheese (Harmony Crème de la Crème), one is a blue cheese (Elberton Blue) and one is inspired by the best Gruyere (Fortsonia).  Other well known cheeses in the bloomy rind category include Constant Bliss by Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, and Green Hill by Sweet Grass Dairy in Georgia.  Both of those cheeses are made from raw but pasteurized cow's milk and can be found online or at Whole Foods for $30-$35 per pound, although you can get Green Hill for much less (about $20 per pound direct from their website).  They are both very well made cheeses that we have tried and enjoy very much, and I'm very confident that if you enjoy these cheeses you'll also love Harmony Crème de la Crème.

Compare these cheeses to a well-aged alpine cheese like Gruyere, which is one of my favorite cheeses and indeed is my inspiration with Fortsonia.  The best reserve cheeses aged for 16 months by Rolf Beeler can be purchased online for about $32 per pound, which is comparable in price to the bloomy rinds mentioned above.  But does this make sense?

In making Fortsonia yesterday, it was an all-day commitment that was quite physically demanding.  By contrast, when I make Harmony Crème de la Crème tomorrow, I'll start at 9:00 a.m. or so and be done by 2:00 p.m.  There's no doubt that the Alpine cheese is a tougher make, so this is a disadvantage to the cheesemaker relative to making the bloomy rind.

Crème de la Crème on the Draining TableLet's turn our attention to yield.  When I make Harmony Crème de la Crème, I consistently get a 15% or better yield. This means that for 100 pounds of milk I get at least 15 pounds of cheese, and I have yielded as much as 17%+!  Part of the high yield is thanks to the Jersey cows, but the real thanks goes to the fact that we only feed our cows grass or hay. No grain, ever. Like many people, I was shocked to learn that other grass-based dairies feed grain to their cows.  Our department of agriculture inspector described other grassfed cheese makers and how they feed a daily ration of grain (twice per day) when the cows are milking.  I guess that's why they're "grass or pasture based" rather than "100% grassfed".  But I don't have a problem with that, as long as everyone is just upfront about what they're doing so consumers can decide what makes sense to them.  We only get just over a gallon per day per cow, which would put us in the hall of shame among other Jersey dairies, where 5-6 gallons per day are the norm.  Naturally this results in MUCH higher costs for us, but we believe the milk itself has better flavor and nutritional qualities, and we think the cows are healthier.

So...where was I?  Ah yes, yield. The Forstonia I made yesterday yielded 11.5%, typical for an Alpine make.  This resulted in 4 pounds LESS cheese per 100 pounds of milk than with the Harmony Crème de la Crème.  So much for all that work.  This makes sense given that bloomy rinds like Camembert typcially have a moisture content of 50%-55% compared to 38%-41% for Gruyere, with blue cheeses falling between those two.

After the cheeses are made, the bloomy rinds need only be aged for 60 days in our case since it's raw milk, or about a month in the case of the others who are pasteurizing their milk.  The Fortsonia and Gruyere's on the other hand have to be hand turned, hand smeared and aged for well over a year, resulting in much higher labor costs and cooling costs during that time.

So let's add this all up. 

Right now, farmstead cheesemakers can make a bloomy rind, age it quickly, sell it for over $30 per pound and the consumer gets 50% moisture.  Or, the cheesemaker can handcraft an Alpine or similar cheese, age it until it's marvelous and get the same or a lower price, work much harder and have a much lower yield.

I think I understand why it's the fresh cheeses and bloomys that artisan or farmstead cheesemakers focus on then.  Easier to make, shorter cash flow cycle and consumers are, curiously, willing to pay more.

So how will this impact our pricing strategy?  Simple...we'll reverse this model.  It costs us less to make a very good bloomy rind and we'll price that accordingly. We're hoping to hit a price of $20 per pound for raw milk, organic, no fine-print Harmony Crème de la Crème.  Elberton Blue yields less than Harmony Crème de la Crème, must be aged longer and tended to more carefully and therefore will be slightly higher in price. However, the pricing on Fortsonia will reflect the effort to make, the reduced yield and the time and care it will take to age it properly. It's too soon to tell, but I suspect it will be in the $35 per pound range next year when we offer it.

The tough part about this is it makes it difficult to estimate how much Fortsonia we should make.  Given that we'll age it for 12-18 months, if we make too much now and run into resistance in the marketplace next year, we would have made quite an investment with a limited return. We could instead just focus on making Harmony Crème de la Crème or Elberton Blue, both of which offer the ability to get a "report card" much more quickly.  On the other hand, if the market really likes and wants Fortsonia, and believe me, they're aren't very many really well made and carefully aged cheeses of those types around, then we'll quickly be out of cheese and 12-18 months away from having much more.

So what's a cheese farmer (ha!) to do?  Make what the wife likes I guess.  Probably 40% Harmony Crème de la Crème, 30% Elberton Blue and 30% Fortsonia and see what happens.  I already know our bloomy rinds are coming along VERY nicely, but I'm still not sure about the Elberton Blue and what adjustments will be needed. As for Fortsonia, initial tests are promising but we won't know for a long time...but I'm pretty optimistic. 

Elberton Blue

The "but" in this case is that we meant to make it with whole, raw milk, "but" we didn't agitate the tank first, and as a result pumped out skim milk to make our Harmony Crème de la Crème, leaving us with pretty much high fat cream with which to make the Elberton Blue.  If that sounds yummy, it is, but it creates a problem.  The problem is that the blue mold won't grow too well in that high fat environment.  So what we have in our first attempt, our friends, is a wonderfully delicious creation that tastes more like raw milk butter with a little salty/blueness to it rather than blue cheese.  Anyway, these journeys are what make farmstead cheese making fun and interesting.

Two nights ago I took some Elberton Blue and made a broccoli/blue cheese soup for Liz. She made some small round loafs of bread that I hollowed out for the bowl. To go with it, I pan seared some Ossabaw pork chops and made a simple blue cheese/cream gravy to go over it.  The cheese was great to cook with, but I have to admit I do cut off hunks of it and just sit and eat it. Always wanted an excuse to just eat gobs of butter!

It's basically a tower of plastic trays that have holes in the bottom.  You place one tray on the stand and fill it with some moist bedding material.  The bedding consists of some compost or loose soil, dried leaves, shredded paper and cardboard, and it came with some coir although you can substitute that with other fibrous material.  The bedding should be wet enough that when you squeeze a handful of it you just barely see water droplets.  Too wet and the worms can drown!  You fill the tray about half full with the bedding and then you tuck a handful of food scraps into one corner of the bedding.  You can feed the worms all types of scraps - even coffee filters and laundry lint!  You just need to make sure that if you use real green material like fresh plants from the garden that it doesn't compost in the bin and heat up making it too hot of an environment for the worms.  The final step is to cover the entire surface area of the tray with 3-4 sheets of damp newspaper. 

I had the bedding tray prepared the day before the worms were to arrive.  The worms came through the mail in a cardboard box of similar bedding.  I put them in the tray and covered them back up with the newspaper.  I wasn't supposed to check on them for 3 days so that they could get adjusted, but I must admit that I sneaked a peek!  They were busy working their way down through the bedding and into the food corner.  All was good!

I have had the worm factory going for almost two months now.  The only chores are to give them another handful of food everynow and then and to make sure the environment is at the right moisture level.  The booklet that came with the factory said that it could take up to 3 months for your factory to really get cranking and so I patiently wait.  So far, they seem really healthy and comfortable but they just don't eat as much as I thought they would.  Maybe they need these first few months to reproduce and populate more?  Anyway, once they really start working, then they should fill this first tray up with good compost and castings.  Once full, I will just add another tray on top and put in some more bedding and food.  The worms should work their way up to the fresh level leaving the bottom level full of black gold for the garden.  I love peeking in at them and talking to them about their work.  Everyone needs a pep talk now and then.  The only thing is that worms hate light so when I take the cover off they all quickly tunnel out of sight. 

Worms can be a great way to get rid of some of your scraps and also make wonderful nutrients for your garden.  I can't wait to see the effects as the factory grows! 

Tim disassembling the high tunnel

We had a professional grade a large flat space for the 3 hoop houses since we did not have equipment for this.  But the ground was so hard after a summer of no rain that there was no way we could put the houses up.  Finally in October the rains started.  The ground softened a bit and we had apprentices to help!!  They took charge of laying out the houses in the graded area.  They measured and used string to decide where the houses would go.  There were 3 rectangles that measured 96X16 feet each.  Then they used spray paint to mark where to drive in each anchor post which is what the hoops attach to.  This may sound easy, but they spent days with measuring tapes and paper and pencil crunching numbers and scratching their heads.  Things get much more complicated the bigger you make them and each house is 96 ft. long so it's easy to be off by just a few inches, yet throw everything out of whack.

Once laid out and marked, the next step is drive anchor posts in the ground.  These houses each have 16 metal hoops so every 6' you drive a smaller metal tube into the ground on either end of the hoop and then slide the hoop over the tops of these anchors and screw them together.  These hoops were so old that when we took them down they were too rusted to unscrew and pull apart from the anchors so they actually had a person come with a machine to pull them right up out of the ground still in tact.  The apprentices job was to detach the anchors from the hoop.  They used a metal grinder to get the screws out and rust off and amazingly enough got them all separated! 

Then they used a sledge hammer to drive the anchors into the ground.  We actually got a driver saved from the previous owner that inserts into the anchor pipe so that the sledge hammer hits this rather than the anchor so that you don't damage the metal pipe with your hammering.  This took many days because it was such hard work that they could only do a few at a time.  The anchors had previously been driven about 3 feet down, but even with the rain, the ground was way too hard so they stood about a foot taller than they were before.  Liz framing a doorNo big deal, the house will still be plenty sturdy in our tough soil and now we have a taller hoop house! 

The next step is to push the hoops over the anchors and screw them together.  We initiated some help during a farm event and got all of the hoops up in one day!  Awesome!  Although the hoops are now anchored to the ground, you still need some support to keep them from moving back and forth.  There is a long metal pipe that attaches to the top arch of the hoop with brackets to keep everything from moving.  This also seems easy enough, but standing up high on a ladder holding a heavy metal pipe and trying to screw in brackets virtually upside-down is not easy at all! 

We got new lumber for framing and this consisted of 1X6 boards which we attached to the anchors of the hoops along the ground of the long side of the house.  This has nothing to do with support, but serves as something to attach the plastic coverings or shade cloth to.  We also used 2X4s to frame in the ends so that we could build a simple plywood door.  Kerry worked so hard on the first one, that he became the owner of the framing and went ahead and framed all 6 ends.  He got amazingly fast after the first few! Hoophouse with shade cloth and side boards

Then things got a bit hung up.  The hoop houses came with shade cloth, but these are old style houses so the shade cloth actually stays on the house all the time and then the plastic goes over it during colder months.  I guess we didn't have to keep it this way, but we actually liked the idea of it, so we'll see how it works.  We started by covering the house with shade cloth and screwing it against the 1X6 boards with a metal channel system which holds it in place.  The houses came with these metal channels called wiggle wire.  Wiggle wire is a system where you screw one metal channel onto the 1X6 boards at ground level permanently and then there is another metal channel covering that can pop into place so you put the plastic between the two channels before popping on the cover and just like that your plastic is held down.  It's supposed to make things easier, but when we took down the houses, the screws were so old and rusted that we couldn't unscrew them and instead used a pry bar to pull the wiggle wire and screws right out of the old rotting boards.  This action bent many of the channels making them very difficult to reassemble.  Also, since the shade cloth that came with the houses was measured to fit the hoop house when the anchors had been driven into the ground 3' deep and we had our houses standing taller, then it no longer fit.  Of course, we didn't realize any of this until we had already put up one and were almost to the end of the house realizing that it wouldn't reach!  So Amanda got our her sowing needle and some fishing line and learned about hog rings (small metal rings that people put in pigs noses so they don't root).  Instead, we used these rings to hold pieces of shade cloth together.  In the end the shade cloth looked like a patchwork quilt, but it will still serve the same purpose! 

So after a lot of complaining and putting up, taking down, screwing in, unscrewing, hammering, metal grinding, and making up creative solutions as we went, we got one house done.  The second and third houses just needs plastic over them, which really is only a few hours of work, but finding a few hours around here for undivided attention is near impossible, so the skeletal hoops remain staring at us each day as if to mock us that we will never get them finished!  I think that building a hoop house really wouldn't be that bad and you could knock one out in a weekend if you weren't retro fitting, etc.  But after looking at the cost of purchasing new wiggle wire alone for one house and seeing that it would cost more than we paid for the entire structure I still think we got a great deal!

Katahdin lambs awaiting their bottle

This is nothing new, as this post by Liz almost exactly one year ago details.  Bottle feeding an Ossabaw Island pigletWe've bottle fed many lambs, and piglets for that matter.  Piglets are much more difficult to bottle feed and it rarely works. Lambs on the other hand can be bottle fed successfully and placed back in the pasture with the rest of the flock when they reach a certain size.

As of now, I have three lambs in my living room, all snug in a blue tub.  And, to my surprise, I walked in yesterday after working with the cheese to find I have three pigs on my dining table, all snug in a container.  Liz has the pink and blue flu again.

I just finished feeding the three little lambs and Liz is feeding the piglets now.  The lambs look good and strong, and Liz tells me that if I go get some straw and pull a chicken tractor up to the front of the house, then the lambs can go inside it and lay on the straw.  So now I go from having three little lambs in a blue box in front of the TV to a chicken tractor outside my front door. No, we're not redneck.  Not at all.

I don't think the piglets will make it. She found these three yesterday abandoned by a young mother, who was subjected to unauthorized breeding.  Piglets almost never make it with bottle feeding, and out of the 30-40 we've tried, only a few have made it past a few days.  But she'll try again and give them all the best chance they could hope for.  It's the only chance they have, and it's the only cure for Liz's pink and blue flu.

We'll write about this again next year, same time, same place.

This slideshow captures the beauty of it all, so I hope you have a widescreen HD monitor. Turn on your speakers, get some hot chocolate, gather the kids and play it in full screen. Enjoy!

Why We're Moving Away from Chicken Tractors

The chicken tractors popularized by Joel Salatin and used by so many pastured poultry producers are indeed so much better than the industrial alternative of 20,000-50,000 chickens being crammed into a poultry house, where they never feel the wind, never feel the sun, never taste the grass and wouldn't know a cricket or a grasshopper if it landed on their beak.  If they had a beak, which has no doubt been snipped off.  Chicken tractors allow the broilers to experience all of these things, resulting in, I believe, a MUCH healthier bird and more nutrient dense food for all of us.  I think there's little doubt if you asked the chicken if it would rather be indoors or out on the grass in the chicken tractor, it would opt for the latter. But would it opt for something else if it could?

We believe it would.  Its natural instincts would be to hunt for insects, eat grass, take dirt baths and roam where it pleases. Naturally, threats exist, so it would want the ability to escape from ground and aerial predators.  In short, it would just want to be a chicken.

Our hens already enjoy this life, free-ranging behind the sheep and cows but with the protection of the eggmobile if they need or want it. It provides the best of all worlds, as they truly free-range and we almost NEVER have a fatality with a laying hen.  So why not provide a similar model for broilers?

One benefit to the chicken tractor, in my opinion, is that allows great control to create and improve fertility wherever it is desired.  Moving the chicken tractor over a 100 square feet piece of land allows the broilers to ingest all the forage they can while saturating the area with fertilizer for dense pasture to regrow. Of course, if you're wondering if the chickens have to lie down and sleep in that "fertilizer", the answer is yes, as they have no way to move out of the tractor and no place to roost.

I can't decide if the final reason we're moving away from the chicken tractors is aesthetics or simply that we don't believe it really mimics nature. But either way, Liz and I just want to see the chickens free-ranging and expressing themselves anyway they want to.  We did a model similar to this in our first year of farming, but now as we enter our third year of pastured poultry, I think we have a much clearer sense of what works...for us.

Nature's Harmony Pastured Poultry Model

Our model going forward is simple in concept. Basically we will create an area fenced in with portable electric netting that we get from Kencove.  We size this area based on the amount of space the allotted number of birds will need for their entire life.  We expect to hatch out 150-200 broilers per week on farm and will place two week's of birds together in one batch on pasture, so there will be anywhere from 300-400 broilers in a netted area. Last year we used about 25 chicken tractors similar to the one in the picture to the left.  In the winter, we use many of these tractors to house breeder turkeys, with one Tom and 5-6 hens occupying each.

In our new system for raising broilers, we will put 4 or so of these tractors in each netted area, but we will remove the doors. This creates an opportunity for us to put roosting structures in one if the young broilers would like to roost, while hanging feeders and waterers in the others.  As needed, we will move these tractors around the paddock, thereby not allowing any particular area to get "bombed out" and enticing the chickens to fertilizer areas we want. 

Our chickens are slow growing French Label Rouge type birds, so they will spend 10-11 weeks on pasture AFTER three weeks in the brood house. This means that we will need 5-6 netted areas for our birds at any one time.  The netting we get from Kencove is in 164' lengths, so we'll probably create a 164' square, for a total area of about 27,000 SF, or just over 6/10 of an acre.  Two batches of birds will spend their life there, and then we'll take down the netting and move it to a fresh area for the next batch.

One consideration we thought a lot about was how to catch the birds at processing time.  But re-purposing the chicken tractors in this manner will make that relatively easy, as they'll be accustomed to going in for food, water and shelter. We can just place the doors back on at that time.

In the end, this system feels right for us. It definitely seems to mimic nature more closely, provides unrestricted access for the chickens to hunt and bath, is more aesthetically pleasing and still puts the fertility right where we want it.