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photo by Bill White Raleigh Magazine
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Celebrity
Dairy - an unlikely history
How do you make cheese? "First, you get a goat". We did,and
the rest followed.
Why a Goat?
"Nobody intends to get into goats - its always an accident".
So I was told by Wesley Thielke in Chino Arizona after buying his dairy
processing plant sight unseen, and living with his family for 3 days while
loading the equipment into a truck for transport back to North Carolina.
He knew: after 30 years of cow dairying, he sold the Wisconsin farm after
WWII and moved to LA, but bought a goat when his first child proved allergic
to cow's milk. Thus began 40 years of goat dairying.
Discovering Goats & Cheese -
Our discovery started when we moved back to North Carolina in 1987 from
Florida to an old farm unworked for the previous 25 years. We bought some
goats to eat down the brush around the old home-place. One of the goats
was in milk, and so before bringing the goats home we spent a couple of
weeks helping our neighbor with evening milking. Not too hard - even for
a city boy: I even learned the meaning of "she kicked the bucket".
Other expressions followed.
Turns out that while intolerant of cow's milk, Fleming had absolutely
no trouble digesting goat's milk. So the goats were bred and multiplied.
More milk than two people could drink resulted to a trip to the library,
and a book on cheese making. Soon the kitchen was full of gallon glass
jars containing marvelous biology experiments. (Hint - if the curd
floats like ivory soap - throw it to the chickens.) Some of the cheese
tasted OK. Other people tried and liked it. Nobody died.
 Building
the Dairy -
In 1989 we decided to build a dairy and make cheese commercially. Thanks
to the foresight of North Carolina's Department of Agriculture, our state
offers practical encouragement to small farmstead producers like ourselves.
But where to find "micro-dairy" equipment? (small-scale dairies
became obsolete with the completion of the Inter-state highway system,
and such equipment hasn't been manufactured since then). We got lucky
- bought a plant in Arizona, and moved it back east. The NCDA inspectors
helped us to design a building around this equipment that conformed to
sanitation rules - and we started building.
The Dairy Grows -
In 1991 with a herd of 18 goats and a new building, we got licensed.
Thus began our ongoing efforts to make consistently good cheese - and
learning to manage the many facets of herd nutrition & health, dairy
equipment operation & maintenance, developing & adapting cheese
making techniques to complement seasonal variations in climate and milk
characteristics. Brit had an engineering assignment in Paris that year
- where he was adopted by a French goat farmer, and learned a lot about
small scale farming and goat cheese. But that's another tale. Left with
the farm, goats, and recalcitrant equipment, Fleming worked through these
startup difficulties alone.
Getting
Better all the Time -
The following 5 years brought gradual growth to our present herd of 64
does, and increasing expertise in cheese making Fleming gradually developed
a basic style of cheese that satisfies her - a fresh Montrachet style
log. These are sold plain, or surface-coated with dried herbs. Garlic/Basil
is the most popular. New flavors creep in from time to time - Rosemary
was requested by one customer, and now has a small but regular following.
Variations occur: Fleming popped bits of extra cheese into the food dehydrator
- yielding small golden nuggets of intense Parmesan-like flavor; and daughter
Lea rescued a batch of yogurt that stubbornly refused to drain by adding
herbs to make a creamy chip-dip spread - and the birth of the "Serendipity"
spreads we package in plastic deli containers. The Jalapeño version
is my favorite.
Most of our cheese is sold the same week it is made, but some occasionally
remains unsold. These few logs begin to mold-ripen, and develop a satisfying
depth and complexity of flavor. Pity there aren't more.
We've entered our cheese in some national competitions - the American
Cheese Society's 1994 event at Shelburne Farms (VT), the 1996 conference
in Madison (WS), and the 2000 Conference in St. Helena (CA). The first
gave silver and bronze awards to our Apricot Serendipity and Garlic/Basil
log, but our plain chèvre log fared poorly. The second awarded
our plain chèvre log a first in class (still a Silver medal - but
just a half-point below the Gold threshold). Points off were for being
"too fresh" - still had that yogurt tang. Maybe we should have
taken a 7-day old cheese instead of a 2-day old one. Still - results we
can live with. The most recent gave us a 3rd place for our mold-ripened
ash-coated pyramid, but failing grades for the fresh chevre. (it didn't
help that UPS lost our cheese entries in the heat of August in a Napa
Valley warehouse for 2 days - after that I'm simply glad nobody died from
tasting it).
Fleming has little enthusiasm for competitions, and puts greater value
on the opinions of farm market customers and local area chefs. They tell
us we're still getting better.
On
an Even Keel -
Celebrity Dairy is now on a plateau: making all the cheese that 2 people
can comfortably handle, and approaching building capacity for animals
and hay storage. Our efforts now are focused upon making work more efficient:
converting from multiple free-standing refrigerators/freezers to walk-ins,
putting wheels under all equipment to reduce lifting/carrying, and so
forth. Hopefully this year we'll start using the pipeline milking system
- and letting a milk pump put us out of the job of lugging 50 pound milk
cans around. Fleming has stepped back from the outdoors work at the dairy
- leaving the animals to Brit, or people he finds to help. She has had
some wonderful interns here to help and learn, and has given more of her
time to cooking and recipe development in the Inn. Perhaps a cookbook
will be forthcoming.
Over the Horizon -
In Spring of 1998 one of our farm market customers asked Fleming how
long she was going to keep making cheese, and she replied that she wanted
to retire in 5 years (age 65), and turn it over to somebody else who would
be interested in taking the business to the next level. I was jolted by
this: we're normally too busy with day to day work to give much thought
to the year 2004, although we ought to. Our immediate market is far larger
than our current production - so the growth potential is real.
But if we actively imagine the future, it will happen. Part of this will
be a younger partner. How will this play out? Perhaps we'll find an intern
who wants to make a life of this, or somebody who's middle-age crisis
runs towards dairy farming instead of sport cars. (Improbable you say?
Brit got tired of going to committee meetings, and build a B&B Inn.
Now he has to run it). Check back in a few years. In the meantime, we're
still milking goats and making cheese.
Next Millennium Update -
So OK - now its 2002 - we're still making cheese at about the same level:
at most 64 goats and the milk/cheese that they can produce. I (Brit) am
now a full-time farmer/innkeeper, and have relieved Fleming of the physical
work with the animals, but she's still the principal cheese maker and
marketer of our cheese. We've had several apprentices - ranging from wonderful
to awful, but haven't yet hit upon anybody who is crazy enough to want
to make a life out of what we are doing (and believe me - it is a life).
Fleming still holds to retiring at 65 - now just a year away. Will we
close the place, will Brit try to take on the whole thing, or will Bill
Gates decide he's had enough of technology, and decide to downsize and
become a goat farmer? If so, we've got a nice house to sell him. Stay
tuned.
Generational Transfer -
July, 2007: One of the things about being so busy with the day to day
operations of our farm and inn is that time and energy are totally absorbed
by activities of the moment, and little given over to reflection and planning.
So from time to time we get inquiries such as this:
"I am so curious to find out if you have found someone to
take over your farm - the last entry of your website history from 2002
has left me wondering what has happened! "
Yup: 5 years is a long time to wonder what's going to happen to Rocky
& Bullwinkle in the next episode. Communicating with the world at
large is something we drag our feet on - witness the five year gap in
this page. But here goes.
- Dairy - with the help of Whitney May - a wonderful apprentice-turned-employee
- we've continued the farmstead dairy operation for 5 years. Whitney's
planned departure in August 2007 puts Fleming and myself both back into
day-to-day cheese making, and sharpens the question of what to do next.
Fleming's thought is that we assume the cheese making ourselves - perhaps
downsizing if necessary to keep things manageable, and actively search
not for another wonderful employee, but a successor who would become
a partner and gradually assume ownership of the dairy. We'll provide
training and support over an extended transition period, with the goal
of a successful continuation of the dairy. Celebrity Dairy has been
an important part of the small scale farming community here for 20 years,
and would be missed by many - ourselves included - if it simply closed.
This is a great opportunity for somebody who has an overriding passion
for making goat cheese, and no more sense than we have. Go figure. If
you know somebody who'd bi interested, you can wonder if you'd be doing
them a favor (or not) by telling them of this opportunity.
- Inn - our B&B Inn was not immune to the 5-year post 9-11 hospitality
industry slump, but nonetheless has developed into a viable business.
We flirted briefly with selling the inn and concentrating on the dairy
5 years ago, but bagged the idea as nobody had a clue about what we
had created or a vision of what to do with it. It is usually a place
of quiet retreat with great breakfasts, but is occasionally taken over
for weekday business retreats or weekend family parties and weddings.
We often cater these events, and to Brit's great pleasure, these give
him more occassions to cook in our fine kitchen. With 10 years practice
he has progressed from being Fleming's timid helper to reasonably competent
at organizing and executing our Sunday dinner menus and creating excellent
buffets for events here at the inn. Not bad for an engineer. Perhaps
someday he'll even be able to make a vinaigrette balanced to Fleming's
satisfaction, but progress there has been slow. What next? No telling,
the cooking is still a lot of fun, but on a particularly bad day every
B&B is for sale, and we're no exception. Someday the right person,
or occasion, will find us willing to sell, but if not, we can simply
close the Inn, and live in an excessively large house. Be careful what
you wish for.
- Incubator Farm - The NC Piedmont is a national center of expertise
in small scale farming, and many young (and equally many not so young)
people come here for academic and apprenticeship training. The opportunities
to start farming are good, but the cost of entry is high. Incubator
farms are a method of nurturing new small scale farming: they give young
farmers the opportunity to practice their new craft using leased land
and shared resources (equipment, packing facility, consultant expertise)
to actually "do it themselves" without a large startup capital
investment in land and equipment. We see this as a valuable transition
between academic training and fully independent farming, and intend
to devote some 50+ acres of our land to an incubator farm project. Our
first investment is building an 8-acre pond for irrigation water later
this year. We're also developing a partnership with Central Carolina
Community College and Carolina Farm Stewardship Assn - who have the
administrative and technical expertise to administer and advise a program
for starting farmers.
- Residential Development - In the 20 years we've lived here we've watched
lifelong farmers retire or die and their land sold. The new owners are
sometimes family, but more often not. With rare exception, none are
farmers. Thus we are turning from an agricultural to a suburban residential
county, with all of the growth problems that change entails. In order
to retire ourselves, we too must eventually sell at least some of our
330 Acres. Our desire is to see that part of the land developed as clusters
of homes on relatively small (1-3 Acre) lots, with the majority of the
land giving shared access to the homeowners, but restricted to agricultural
use through appropriate conservation easements. We're currently engaged
in a soil science survey to determine what parts of our forest land
could become building lots, and which areas best suited to be farmed,
forested, or simply left undisturbed. We're envisioning perhaps 30-50
home sites, with 200+ acres of shared access common land that can continue
to support a goat dairy, the incubator farm project, forestry, and other
small farm operations. Some innovative developers are inserting working
farmland into subdivisions as an amenity: We wish to look in the other
end of the telescope, and insert some residences into an ongoing farm.
How will this be implemented? Not sure yet - maybe we do it, or maybe
we work with a developer who "gets it", and can work towards
our vision. The next couple of years will tell.
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