Let There Be Cheese (Part 1)

“It’s official!!!” my sister Kara comes bounding into the room, ready to burst with excitement?

“What is?” I turn around from my meeting with John Adler, planning the next session in our Artist’s Way workshop series.

“I passed! I passed the cheesemaker’s exam! I just got the email from the State. It’s real!”

She bounds off again, ready to announce to the online world her massive accomplishment. Nearly five years into the process, we had at last made it through the remaining hurtle between us and making our own cheese on the farm.

It’s the dairy state, so running the gauntlet of becoming a licensed cheesemaker is a serious ordeal. Currently, there are only 61 (well, now 62) women cheesemakers in Wisconsin, so it’s a pretty exclusive club. Kara said people were telling her that sitting for the final exam was like sitting for her “cheese boards.”

Wisconsin was the first state to implement cheese grading and also the first to require the licensing of cheesemakers. To this day, it is still the hardest state to become a licensed cheesemaker. And even though California makes the most milk, Wisconsin is still the leader in cheesemaking—producing 30% of the nation’s cheese.

Cheese is as synonymous with Wisconsin as bratwurst, beer, and snowy winters. But was it always this way? We’ll turn back the clock for a moment and unpack how Wisconsin even became the nation’s diaryland.

If you look at the state flag, there’s no cow or dairyman. Instead the supporting characters are a sailor (Great Lakes shipping industries) and a miner (ore, nickel, and lead industries). If you visit the state capitol in Madison, the agrarian murals celebrate not the cow but wheat. Wheat? Really?

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, this region had but recently lost the status of being the western frontier to the Great Planes states. The king of cropland at the time was wheat. Western frontiers had served as the nation’s bread basket all along, but Wisconsin’s soils were not ready for the demands of wheat. Unlike the fertile, deep-soiled lands of unglaciated states, Wisconsin was king of wheat for only a short while before the topsoil became exhausted and wheat growing moved westward yet again.

Corn and soy crop rotation, so omnipresent today, had not been developed yet, so regional agriculture had to come up with something else to grow or raise instead (or move westward, as many did).

When soils are drained of nutrients, the best ancient and modern solution is to stop tilling and plant with grasses and legumes and then to graze this vegetation with herbivores. Joel Salatin of Virginia’s Polyface Farms has been a major leader in bringing this naturally land-revitalizing practice back into contemporary perspective, but the process is as old as herding. We use these practices on our farm as well, with our chosen herbivores being sheep.

It works like this: as the grasses grow tall, they also grow longer roots. When the grasses are grazed, because the foliage is shortened, the roots also shorten, sloughing their farther-reaching parts. This decomposes and adds organic material to the soil. Repeat this process over and over and over through the months and years (along with the fertilizing manure of the herbivores doing the forage-munching) and topsoil is regained and regenerated. The damage from the nutrient-hungry wheat can be replenished and the “used-up” land can become fertile once again.

Here’s an interesting overlap. Couple this natural solution before the days of chemical fertilizers as a “fix-it” option with a new scientific awareness: nutrition. As the study of nutrition came into social consciousness, the call for fresh, wholesome, country milk rose to a cry. And while milk could not be shipped very far at the time, cheese was much more portable, offering accessible ways to increase calcium, protein, and other important nutrients into the diet.

So, Wisconsin couldn’t be a bread basket anymore, and it needed to revert to having grazed grasslands in order to remain agriculturally viable. Pair this with the increased demand for high-quality dairy products and instant markets in growing cities like Chicago, and a sea-change was born. Wisconsin became a state ripe for dairying.

There was a hiccup, though, which was that dairying had been traditionally seen as an activity for women on a home-scale operation basis. In order to become “the dairy state,” dairying had to be pitched as an avocation to male farmers, who were constantly incented to scale up their herd and farm size. These pressures persist today with continually shrinking numbers of dairy farms in the state (though the number of cows continues to climb) and the disparity of men versus women in the industry.

But this is starting to make a change recently. While scaling up has its luster and promises of efficiency and capital gains, there is a yearning to get back to that artisanal, hand-crafted, direct-from-the-land product that tastes and feels of soulful practice. Instead of just relying on a comfort brand, people want to actually know their farmer and support a craft-focused artisan on a small-scale family farm.

They want the new way of agrarianism, which is really a hand reaching back to the old, the traditional, the small-batch, the heritage-driven, and the aesthetically appreciable. It’s a yearning for an experience rather than a commodity.

That yearning for the artisanal has been a major part of our personal journey to this place of FINALLY being able to make cheese on our farm. More of that journey coming up in part two of this story! See you down on the farm sometime.