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“The proof of the pudding is in the tasting,” says Lifeline Farm’s
Ernie Harvey, hoisting a block of Lifeline extra sharp cheddar.
In his checked wool pants, knit cap and ratty sweater, he
looks like the poster model for International Farmer, circa
1925, just as at home in Vilnius or Yorkshire as Victor, Montana.
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The pound and a half of rich yellow cheese he holds in his
hand has taken over a year and a half to reach its present
state from the milk from which it was made, and if you ask
Ernie, the story doesn’t even start there. It starts
with vibrant life-forces concentrated on the 500 carefully
tended acres he leases for his dairy operation. Ernie’s
trained eye sees an ever-so-slightly yellower cheese than
the milder cheddars, colored by the seasonal blossoms his
cows grazed on two springs ago. He tastes his fields in the
cheese, and everything that draws energy from them. He tastes
life.
And so he should. Lifeline Farm is one of a growing number
of biodynamic farms in the United States and around the world,
businesses dedicated to the agricultural application of a
natural philosophy whose proponents see it as more than just
a means of raising wholesome and nutritious food. If Ernie
Harvey didn’t taste life-force in his cheese, he wouldn’t
be a very convincing adherent to biodynamic farming.
Cheese is the way a specific region or landscape tells its
story through milk, in the same manner that wine is how a
place tells its story through fruit or grapes. At least it
should be. A slice of cheese from a block of most commercial
cheddars, produced in a huge batches from the mixed-up milk
of a dozen or more dairy farms scattered around the Northwest,
doesn’t tell you any more about a particular farm than
a Bennetton commercial tells you about a specific country
or culture. If you know what to taste for, though, a slice
of Lifeline cheddar can speak volumes about the passing of
seasons in one tiny corner of Montana—hardly a state
renowned for its cheeses—and the organisms that thrive
in its soil. And if Ernie Harvey has his say, this 24-ounce
block of Lifeline is only the foretaste of a regionalism in
cheese-making. And, like he says, the proof of his methods
is in the tasting.
Got milk?
Lifeline Farm sits about a mile outside of Victor on Pleasantview
Drive, one of those waving roads where people coming in the
other direction customarily nod and lift at least two fingers
from the steering wheel in salute. You turn into the driveway
by the mailbox with the “Got Milk?” sticker and
a pack of four nearly identical Border collies charges out
to meet you. Three of them are sisters; the father, Champ,
has had both of his back legs broken from lying under trucks,
but he still gets around fine, and with more gaits than an
Icelandic pony. Another quartet, this one of grubby ducks,
pecks around the edges of a block of ice hauled off a 75-gallon
watering tub for the knobby-kneed calves that stop and stare
as you walk past. A gray tabby with the stocky build of a
bulldog bats a freshly killed starling around beneath the
wheels of a steel refrigerator tank. The only sounds at ten
in the morning are the hum of the automatic milking machine
and the patter of rain on tin roofing.
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Inside the milking parlor, Lifeline milker Clint Weidkamp
coaxes a new heifer into the first of four stalls. There’s
a note written in marker on sheet of dry-erase board to keep
“kickers” out of this stall—the same milk
pipe has already been broken twice by lunging hooves—so
Weidkamp fits this one with an aluminum brace that clamps
around her right hindquarter and makes it uncomfortable for
her to lift her leg. The air is moist and rich with the distinctive
smell of milking: raw milk, teat dip, grain dust, the gentle
cider scent of fresh urine. Fresh manure, too, dollops of
it ramping over the concrete lip of the stall floor like lava
bombs flung from a brown volcano.
Weidkamp has been with Lifeline since September, 2001, a 15-year
veteran of farming from Washington state who lives just across
the field from the dairy. The last place he worked had a carousel
milker that could handle 600 cows in three hours. Here it
takes him about five hours to milk the 90 cows that file into
the stalls four at a time, twice a day. Milk production is
lower at Lifeline, too, he says. In Washington, he got used
to “hundred-pound cows,” sagging with milk from
hormones that cause the animal’s body to think it is
nursing a calf all the time, keeping its milk output high
where it would naturally have fallen off.
The Washington cows were fed TMR, or total mixed rations:
hay, grain and silage blended for maximum protein content
and chopped so finely that the farmer had to add straw just
so his animals got enough fiber. Lifeline cows eat hay and
organic barley in the winter, grass and grain in the summer.
In order for the cheese to bear the emblem of the New York
State-based Demeter Association—the national certifying
organization for biodynamic farming—Lifeline has to
raise 80 percent of its own organic feed. No synthetic pesticides,
herbicides, fungicides, growth hormones or chemical treatments
of any kind are used. Antibiotics are equally verboten, Weidkamp
says, except in special circumstances, in which case the milk
can’t be used and the treated cow is taken out of the
milking herd.
“Ernie’s cows are really healthy in general because
they have a lot stronger immune systems,” he observes,
dipping a heifer’s teats in iodine solution and yanking
a rope that opens the stall to send her back into the yard.
“A lot less problems than I’ve ever seen, with
everything from calving to feeding.”
Lifeline treats occasional ailments in its herd with homeopathic
remedies manufactured primarily for humans. There’s
a medicine cabinet full of them, its corners laced with cobwebs
and rimed with barley dust like everything else in the corner
of a milking parlor, shelves filled with small brown bottles
factory-labeled with herbal and mineral ingredients and the
symptoms they treat. Arnica Abrotanum for indigestion with
appetite. Antimonium tartarticum for loose cough. Silicea—powdered
flint—for suppuration. Sepia—powdered cuttlefish—for
“indifference” in humans, ringworm in cattle.
Even the dairy farmer’s old standby, bag balm for chapped
teats, is verboten on a Demeter-certified farm—it contains
petroleum products. For inflamed udders, Lifeline milkers
lay on a dollop of Ernie’s Mastitis Salve, made from
bee balm, marjoram and lard rendered from the farm’s
own pigs. For injured teats, Ernie’s Injured Teat Salve—lard,
calendula and tea tree oil.
“The vet we have is like, ‘You might as well throw
all that shit in the garbage,’” Weidkamp admits.
“He says, ‘It ain’t worth it.’ Sometimes
they work, sometimes they don’t, is kind of what I think.
Never seen the book of do or don’t.”
The book of Steiner
If there is a big book of do or don’t at Lifeline Farm,
it’s probably Agriculture or something else written
by Austrian-born philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner.
Or by one of Steiner’s many students. Steiner, a prolific
polymath who delivered over 6,000 lectures in Europe during
his lifetime, laid the foundations for a number of economic,
social and spiritual movements— including biodynamic
farming, the principles of which he first laid out in a course
of eight lectures delivered to German farmers in 1924. Chief
among Steiner’s teachings were the concepts of the Earth
as a living and constantly evolving entity, and of individual
farms as unique, self-contained organisms that have also evolved
on the basis of local or even micro-local conditions. Renewal
of the soil with specially made compost, renewal of Christianity
with an infusion of folk wisdom and ancient teachings, ecology,
nutrition, health and vitality are all bound up in Steiner’s
overarching philosophy, called anthroposophy (“wisdom
of man”), of which biodynamic farming is merely one
outgrowth.
Proper care of animals is a key principle in biodynamic farming.
Lifeline Farm cattle are not polled; the horns are considered
an integral part of the cow’s “astrality,”
or animal nature, her essential cowness, and they “ray”
a certain kind of energy back into the cow’s digestive
system. Their tails, also untrimmed, dangle within a few inches
of the ground in Alanis Morrisette spiral curls curls caked
with manure.
To the newcomer, there’s something both endearing and
slightly ridiculous about some of the more visible aspects
of biodynamic animal husbandry—like a five-year-old
boy whose mother has never cut his hair. But this is not to
say that the Lifeline folks don’t see the potential
for humor in their methods, which admittedly put them at odds
with farming practices that hew more closely to the materialist
sciences. It’s serious business, but both Ernie and
his partner, Jennifer Holmes, punctuate their various biodynamic
dissertations to me over the course of three days at Lifeline
with ready wit and easy laughter.
“Ernie says that a lot of it sounds like voodoo,”
Jennifer says, laughing as she pours a pail of yellow colostrum
into plastic jugs to freeze for the calves to feed on later.
“And he knows a hell of a lot more about biodynamics
than he lets on. Last night we were talking about what to
say and what not to say, because a lot of it sounds like pagan
ritual, with astrology and cosmic rhythms and things like
that. Some people look at it as non-scientific, but if you
talk to farmers who are two generations back, they say ‘Oh
yeah’ about a lot of things we do.”
Give me that old-time biodynamic cheese
Whether or not they agree with all particulars of biodynamic
farming, the old-time farmers would almost certainly approve
of how the cheese is made: by hand, in small batches. For
the past four years, Lifeline has been hauling its milk once
a week to a plant in Bozeman run by a third-generation cheese-maker
named Daryl Heep. Lifeline’s two refrigerated trailer-tanks
hold five thousand pounds of fresh milk each—slightly
more than the milk vat at the Bozeman plant can handle, with
the result that it takes two batches to make each tank of
milk into cheese.
“It takes a lot more labor and a lot more time,”
Ernie says, “There are more risks of inconsistency in
the cheese just because you’re doing more than one batch.
However, if you screw it up, at least you only screw up half
as much.”
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First the milk is pasteurized—brought to 150 degrees and
held for 20 minutes. After it’s been cooled to a constant
90 degrees, a freeze-dried bacterial culture is added—about
a handful for every thousand gallons of milk—and the cheese-maker
begins to monitor the pH to see how the culture is progressing.
When it reaches a certain level of acidity, the cheese-maker
adds an enzyme called rennin which coagulates the milk-cheese
liquid and renders it the consistency of stiff custard, and
starts testing it with methods like running a finger under the
surface skin to examine the way it breaks and slides off.
“It is a hand process,” Ernie explains. “Kind
of like kneading bread and knowing when the glutens are right.”
When the consistency is to his satisfaction, the cheese-maker
makes two passes through the batch with a pair of stainless
steel “harps,” one strung with wires to cut the
curd horizontally and the another to cut it vertically, allowing
the yellowish whey to drain off. At this point in the process,
jack cheese is cooled with water, salted and flavored (with
hot peppers, for example), and the curds placed into 40-pound
blocks in collapsible stainless steel boxes that go under
a press for six to twelve hours. If the batch is to become
Lifeline cheddar (both cheeses are made with the same culture),
the curd will undergo a cheddaring process to create its distinctive
crumbly texture. The curds are pushed into two banks, cut
into slabs to allow more of the whey to drain off, flipped
and stacked three times into ever taller piles. Then the slabs
are run through a cheddaring mill, which shreds them into
the irregular lumps that some cheese outfits package and sell
as “squeaky cheese.” The rest of the curd is salted,
pressed, vacuum-sealed in plastic bags and placed in cool
storage. The culturing process continues as the mild cheddar
is allowed to age for about two months. If it’s destined
to be sharp or extra sharp cheddar, two months is only the
beginning.
“Cheese is neat,” Ernie tells me, “especially
cheddar, in that it’s always been a way of banking your
milk. And cheddar, of course, increases in value. First you
have your mild and medium, and then you have sharp, which
increases its value by 20 percent. And then extra-sharp is
another 20.
Additional stages in the basic process also create Lifeline’s
third basic cheese variety, which is made from a different
culture than jack and cheddar. That’s the mozzarella—or
kind of mozzarella, anyway.
“It’s a bit of a confidential process, that one,”
Ernie says elusively. “It’s not mozzarella, it’s
montzarella. Montana mozzarella.”
“But it’s not like most mozzarella,” he
hints, “where it’s reheated and stretched. We
do it a little differently by heating the curd, mechanically
agitating it and then pressing it into blocks.”
There are as many ways to make cheese as there are cheeses,
he proclaims, and each cheese-maker will have his own technique.
I tell him I like the idea of a cheese-maker’s confidentiality
concerning the mozzarella process, and we let it go at that.
The rule of thumb for figuring cheese from milk is ten pounds
of the former for every hundred pounds of the latter. Eleven
gallons of milk weigh about a hundred pounds, so it figures
out to roughly a pound to the gallon.
Lifeline cows, however, produce about 13 pounds of cheese
per hundred gallons. The higher yield, Ernie says, is due
to the breed and the way the animals are fed.
“The Brown Swiss breed’s milk is very high in
proteins and solids. During the cheese-making process the
protein, casein, makes this web that kind of catches the solids
in the milk, so the yield is determined by the amount and
quality of this protein. The fat is only useful up to a certain
point. It depends on the process and the quality of the protein,
but only a certain amount of fat can be absorbed into the
curd.”
The rest, he says, goes out in the whey, which accounts for
the approximately 86 percent of the original milk that doesn’t
turn into cheese. And it doesn’t take much talking about
whey with Ernie to figure out that he wants it back. Right
now it’s too much of a hassle, too much wear and tear
on the vehicles hauling all that liquid back from Bozeman,
but all that will change when the new plant goes in.
Hay to tray
The footings have already been poured. By January, Victor
will be home to the first neighborhood creamery to be built
in the Bitterroot in decades. There used to be four or five
in the valley, Ernie says, but not anymore. They still hold
the Creamery Picnic every year in Stevensville, he says with
a chuckle, but there’s no longer a creamery.
Reclaiming the protein- and mineral-rich whey—which
currently goes to feed hogs in Bozeman—to feed to the
Lifeline calves is an important first step because it fulfills
one of the key principles of biodynamic agriculture: making
each individual farm as much of a self-contained, closed biological
circle as possible. And there’s another problem with
transporting whey when it’s still warm from the cheese-making
process—the longer the culture works on it, the more
acidic it gets until the cows’ digestive tracts can’t
handle it. Unless it’s cooled quickly with a heat exchanger
(more time, more money), it’s only good for feeding
hogs like the ones in Bozeman. Having the Lifeline creamery
just down the road will change all that, and with hundreds
of gallons of the stuff draining from each batch of cheese,
there should be plenty to go around. Not coincidentally, Lifeline
is planning to increase pig production fourfold.
The whey also makes great cultured butter, Ernie says. Butter
and milk are two new areas Lifeline is tentatively planning
to expand into. Skim milk is an attractive proposition because
of demand for low-fat dairy products, and a happy corollary
of skim-milk production is that it also produces butterfat.
And talk about truth in advertising. The picture that graces
every package of Lifeline cheese—Katrine the Brown Swiss
working on a mouthful of red clover against the backdrop of
the Three Sisters peaks—is already an accurate depiction
of where the milk is produced. Next year it will sum up a
milking operation that can take its product from grass to
glass, hay to tray in the same few square miles. That’s
local for you.
“We want to develop our own cheeses that are particular
to this area and our situation,” Ernie says. “Part
of our focus is that we’re also populist farmers, in
that we’re trying to produce for our community and not
just the gourmet market that a lot of cheese-makers get into,
especially small cheese-makers.
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“And in some ways it’s paid off to take the populist
approach versus the gourmet approach,” he concludes.
“I mean, we still think that we produce really high-quality
product, but we also produce enough of it and cheap enough
that common people can afford it.”
Tasting dandelions
“When you spend a lot of time around cheese,”
Ernie says, “It’s amazing how much it changes.
We have this cheddar that’s made between the first of
May and the first of June called dandelion cheddar. It’s
noticeably yellower, because we have a lot of dandelions and
the color of the blossom comes through. Once you call it dandelion
cheddar, I don’t know if it’s the power of suggestion
or what, but you soon begin to taste the flavor of dandelions.”
So there I get a very specific answer to my
guiding question of what we taste when we taste cheese. We’re
tasting dandelions—hardly anybody’s favorite plant,
but I love ‘em. On my last day at the farm, I get Ernie
back for buying me lunch at the Hamilton House the day before
with some super-special, private-reserve dandelion mead I
made earlier this year, and he warms to the topic of humble
Taraxacum officinale. Dandelions, it turns out, have a very
special place in the biodynamic scheme, linked by Rudolf Steiner
to properties of bitterness, the element sulfur, the planet
Jupiter and forces of light concentrated in the Earth during
winter months. Dandelions, along with a few other plants like
yarrow, chamomile and nettles, are the main ingredients in
a number of specially fermented herbal “preps”
that supercharge the compost Lifeline spreads over its 500-odd
acres of leased pasturage.
These are the parts of biodynamic farming that Ernie prefers
to remain quiet about—the parts that he says sound kind
of like voodoo. As with the medicines he uses to treat the
occasional affliction in his herd, Ernie applies the preps
at a homeopathic ratio of about one gram of herbal matter
per ton of compost.
“It’s beyond molecular possibilities,” he
admits. “The dilution is so great that there shouldn’t
be any of that in there. And yet, it has a very powerful effect.
The great thing about biodynamics is that it works.”
And the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.
Editor's Note: The following piece was originally published
in the Missoula [Montana] Independent for the week of November
14-21, 2002. Visit the Independent online at www.missoulanews.com.
Andy Smetanka is arts editor of the Missoula Independent,
the award-winning alternative newsweekly of Missoula, Montana.
He enjoys music, filmmaking, and the birds, bees, cheese and
trees of his home state. You can reach him at smetanka@missoulanews.com.
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