A Year on a Dairy Farm

8. Chapter 08 Goats Sheep And The Cheese Acros

In eastern France, in the mountains of the Jura along the Swiss border, a cheese called Comté is made under a set of rules that have been in place since 1958. The rules are not, primarily, about taste. They are about who gets to make a living.

The cheese itself is excellent. It is a hard cheese, aged anywhere from four months to three years, with a flavor that ranges from fresh and grassy at the young end to nutty and almost caramelized at the old end. About seventy thousand tons of it are made every year, more than any other appellation cheese in France. If you have eaten Comté in the United States — at a cheese counter, in a restaurant — you know what it tastes like. What you may not know is what it represents.

Comté is made under what the French call an appellation d’origine contrôlée, an A.O.C., which is a legal designation that says: this cheese can be called by this name only if it is made in this place, by these methods, from milk produced under these conditions. The A.O.C. for Comté is roughly forty pages of rules. Among them:

• The cheese can only be made in a defined geographic zone covering parts of three French departments — the Jura, the Doubs, and the Ain — totaling about three and a half million acres.

• The milk can only come from two breeds of cow, the Montbéliarde and the French Simmental, both adapted to the Jura’s mountain pastures.

• The cows must spend at least half the year on grass. They cannot be fed silage of any kind.

• The land must be stocked at no more than approximately one cow per hectare — about two and a half acres per cow, which is extraordinarily low and means that the pastures are not pushed.

• The milk cannot be transported more than twenty-five kilometers from the cow to the cheesemaker. About fifteen miles.

• The cheese must be made in copper vats, by hand, in cooperatives the French call fruitières.

• The aging must be done in caves at controlled humidity and temperature, for a minimum of four months and usually much longer.

About three thousand dairy farmers, with herds averaging maybe forty cows each, ship their milk to about a hundred and fifty fruitières scattered across the region. The fruitière in any given village is owned, cooperatively, by the farmers who supply it. The cheesemaker is an employee of the cooperative. The cheese is then sold, mostly to specialized aging houses called affineurs, who hold it in their caves for the necessary months and then sell it on. Profits flow back through the chain, and a substantial share — much more than in the American system — ends up in the hands of the farmers who produced the milk.

This is the thing worth being clear about. A Comté farmer with thirty cows can make a living. A Comté farmer with thirty cows can pay her workers, raise her children, send those children to university, retire, and pass the farm on. A New York dairy farmer with thirty cows cannot.

How can this be?

Several things at once.

The first is the appellation itself. Because Comté can only be made in a specific way in a specific place, no industrial dairy in another part of France can flood the market with Comté-labeled cheese. The supply is, in effect, capped. Demand has grown over decades. Price has risen with demand. The premium farmers receive for milk that goes to Comté is roughly thirty to forty percent higher than the price for non-appellation milk. Over a year, on a small farm, that premium is the difference between solvency and not.

The second is the cooperative structure. In the American dairy system, as we saw in June, the farmer sells milk to a co-op, the co-op sells it to a processor, the processor sells the finished product, and most of the markup at each stage stays at that stage. In the Comté system the farmer is part of the entity that makes the cheese. The fruitière is owned by its members. When the cheese sells, the value flows back. The cheesemaker is paid a salary, the affineur takes their cut, but a large share of the residual goes to the people who produced the milk.

The third is the cultural and political agreement that this is worth doing. The French state has, since the early twentieth century, maintained a policy of agricultural protection that is foreign to most American thinking about food. The A.O.C. system covers more than three hundred French products, from wines to cheeses to meats to lentils, and it is administered by a federal agency with substantial enforcement power. The French government and the European Union both subsidize small farmers in ways the American government largely does not. The point of all of this is not, primarily, economic efficiency — bigger industrial farms could produce more food more cheaply. The point is the preservation of a way of life, a tradition of food, a rural population, a landscape. The French have decided, through their politics, that these things are worth paying for.

Americans have, broadly, decided otherwise.

Within the United States, where no equivalent system exists, some small dairy farmers have made a different choice. They have raised goats or sheep instead of cows.

A dairy goat weighs about a hundred and fifty pounds, an order of magnitude smaller than a cow. A dairy goat gives one to two gallons of milk a day, depending on breed and management — perhaps a fifth of what a cow gives. The milk is high in butterfat, moderately easy to digest, and has the slight tangy quality you taste in good chèvre. Goats are also browsers — they prefer brushy plants, vines, leaves — and they can use land that a cow cannot use, which on hilly New York property turns out to matter.

A dairy sheep is similar in size to a goat, about a hundred and fifty pounds, but gives much less milk: perhaps half a gallon a day at peak, much less than a goat or a cow. The milk is rich. The fat globules are smaller than in cow milk, and the milk itself contains roughly twice as much fat and protein per gallon. It is the milk that makes Roquefort in France, Pecorino in Italy, Manchego in Spain.

The economics of small ruminant dairying are different from those of cow dairying in important ways. The animals cost less. The barns cost less. The milking equipment costs less. The feed required is less. The land required is less. A small farmer with twenty acres and limited capital can plausibly start a dairy operation with goats or sheep. The same farmer, on the same land, would have a very hard time starting a cow dairy.

The trade-off is the market. Goat and sheep dairy products are niche in the United States. Almost all of the goat milk produced is made into cheese, sold either directly to consumers at farmers markets or to specialty wholesalers. Sheep dairy is even smaller. There are perhaps a thousand commercial sheep dairies in the entire country. The total American sheep dairy industry is smaller, in volume, than a single large cow dairy in California.

But for some farmers the smaller market is a feature, not a bug. The price per gallon for goat or sheep milk, sold as cheese, is far higher than the price per gallon for cow milk. The customer base is people willing to pay more for an artisanal product. The work is hard, but the scale is human. A small goat dairy with thirty animals can be run by one or two people, with much less equipment and much less labor and much less capital than a small cow dairy. The path to viability is harder to find, but easier to walk once found.

There are not many of these farms. Most that are tried do not last. The ones that do tend to share certain features: the operator already has another source of income (a spouse with a job, a partial pension, a remote tech career); the farm produces a value-added product (cheese, not raw milk) that the farmer is making and selling directly; the farm has built a local customer base over several years; the farm has accepted that the operator’s income will be modest for a long time, possibly forever.

Tom does not raise goats or sheep. He has thought about it. He has friends who have done it. They have, on the whole, smaller herds, smaller farms, smaller checks at the end of the month, and slightly less back pain. They are, on average, holding on.

What is the use of telling Americans about Comté?

It is not, primarily, to argue that the United States should adopt the A.O.C. system. The political and cultural conditions that produced the French system over two centuries are not present in the United States, and a top-down attempt to copy it would, in all likelihood, not work. The American food economy is different — bigger, more industrial, more tied to commodity markets, less anchored in regional tradition. To say we should be more like France is the kind of thing that sounds good at a dinner party and is hard to operationalize.

The use of telling Americans about Comté is the same as the use of telling them about anything from elsewhere: it makes visible the assumptions inside the system they live in. An American who has never heard of A.O.C. tends to assume that the way American dairy works is more or less the way dairy works. It is not. There are systems in which a thirty-cow farmer can make a living. There are systems in which the price of milk is set partly by tradition, partly by region, partly by the deliberate decision of a society to keep small producers in business. There are systems in which the rules around cheesemaking are written in cooperation with the cheesemakers themselves, rather than handed down by a federal agency a thousand miles away. These systems exist. They are working today. They are real, not theoretical.

Whether any of this could ever apply to Tom’s farm in Schuyler County is an open question, and probably not the right one. The right question is the one a reader of this book can hold for a long time, without rushing to answer: Why is the system the way it is, and what would it take to make it different?

Tom and Sarah have eaten Comté. Sarah brings it home from Wegmans every December for the Christmas cheeseboard. They know what it is. They know it is made by small farmers in the mountains of France. They have, once or twice over the years, joked between themselves that they were born on the wrong continent.

But Tom is a New York dairy farmer in a system that is American, and his farm is the farm he has, and he is the farmer he is. He produces, every year, about a hundred and fifty thousand gallons of milk on two hundred and ten acres of land, with the help of one full-time worker, his wife when she has time, his daughter when she is home, and ninety-some cows. He sells the milk through his co-op to a processor who sends it to grocery stores. He gets a check that depends on prices set by other people in other rooms. The milk leaves the farm in a tanker. The check arrives by direct deposit on the eighth of the month.

There is no Comté in this. There is only this farm and these animals and this work and this checkbook. It is, in the language of the system Tom lives inside, a successful operation. It is also a place a person could lose, in any given year, depending on the weather, the prices, the breakdowns. It is, like every farm of its size in America, the survivor of a system that has, for the past three decades, been quietly removing the others.

The cheese in the suburbs is real. The farms that made it are real. The fact that those farms are not American farms is also real.

That is, for now, the thing to know.

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