FYI on the challenges of raising sheep for farmstead cheese production.
http://www.janetfletcher.com/blog/2016/11/26/acclaimed-cheesemaker-calls-it…
Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:
Recently the husband-and-wife owners of Georgia’s acclaimed Many Fold Farm
posted a dismaying announcement on Facebook: On January 1, they would cease
making cheese.
The news rattled the cheese world because the young creamery seemed to be
thriving, with a blue ribbon for Condor’s Ruin (above right) at the
American Cheese Society competition, a second-place finish for the aged
Peekville Tomme, and a growing presence for its sheep’s milk cheeses in
influential shops.
Ross and Rebecca Williams purchased their farm in Palmetto, Georgia, in
2009. They introduced their first cheeses three years later and now manage
200 East Friesian dairy sheep. Their ambition—to provide a successful
example of sustainable, pasture-based farming in the South—now seems
heartbreakingly out of reach.
What does the Williamses’ experience say about the future of sheep cheese
in the U.S.? For a glimpse of an answer, I spoke with Rebecca about the
creamery’s challenges.
How much cheese were you making and was it selling well?
We produced 25,000 to 30,000 pounds of cheese a year, and we could have
sold triple what we were making. There was never a problem with the market.
The problem was always our ability to produce.
You wrote that making farmstead cheese in the U. S. is more challenging
than other types of work. Would you elaborate?
Dairy work is some of the hardest farm work there is. It’s 24/7. You can’t
leave. You are tied to the land and the animals. Combine that with the fact
there has not been a concerted effort to improve dairy-sheep genetics in
the U.S. so that the sheep produce well and thrive in different
environments.
You can have your pick of cow breeds that produce good-quality milk and
enough volume to run a business. But the sheep dairy flock is not well
managed from a utility perspective. None of the breeds is high yielding in
a pasture-based setting. They need to be kept indoors, on high-energy feed.
If that’s not your philosophy or you don’t have capital to house sheep
indoors, it’s hard to get the volume of milk you need. So you end up
milking hundreds of animals that aren’t giving enough to have an efficient
system. Where you could get by milking 60 cows, you have to milk 300 sheep
or more. That’s just incredibly labor intensive.
You didn’t realize that before you started?
I knew we were going to be pioneers, but if we had known that it was going
to be this hard we probably wouldn’t have done it. Our original
business-plan numbers were from research in Europe where they have
completely different dairy stock. We were getting less than a liter of milk
a day (per ewe).
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James Ellingson cell 651 645 0753
Great Lakes Brewing News, 5219 Elliot Ave, Mpls, MN 55417
James(a)BrewingNews.com BeerGovernor(a)gmail.com
