Camaraderie, recreation, and personal interest were the primary purposes of the visit, so we didn't take notes or ask a lot of probing interview-type questions. I did take a bunch of photos, however, and perhaps the curdnerd, the Fat Guy, and others will chime in and elaborate on what the pictures show.
We began in the milking barn at around 8:00am (which required a 6:30am departure from Manhattan). Jonathan introduced us to each cow by name. Here are his ladies.
It's impossible to overemphasize how well Jonathan treats his animals. Many of them, he rescued from factory farms and nursed back to health. You can see it in their bearing and attitude, and especially in the behavior of the happy and inquisitive calves.
The calves feed out of a simulated-udder contraption imported from New Zealand (much of the equipment for the kind of sustainable farming and grass-feeding that Jonathan practices comes from NZ).
In the dairy, the curds are cut.
Then they hang out for awhile until Jonathan decides it's time to put them in molds.
Most of the whey is drained off (it will be fed to the calves). Today Jonathan was making blue cheese, so to the drained curds he added salt and bits of bread containing wild cultures. Then the curds are hand-packed into molds. An entire day's milking (actually half each of two days because it's the evening milk from the night before plus the morning milk from that day) at Jonathan's farm currently makes 8 blue cheeses of about 10 pounds each. He will grow (the farm is less than a year old and he is expanding the herd), but not by much. Now that's artisanal.
The newly made cheeses go on racks in the dairy for a day or two (these are the previous days' efforts).
Then they get moved into Jonathan's ripening room, which is one of the neatest places on the planet to hang out.
Curdnerd, Fat Guy, and I tasted a bunch of cheeses, and it's no exaggeration to say that of the seven or eight that we tasted, all were superlative and three were better than any cheese we've had in the US and as good as any we've had in Europe--and significantly better than most. These are all raw-milk cheeses, aged the legally required 60 days (longer for blue, cheddar, and the like), and they rule. They're so good you laugh when you taste them.
We also engaged in miscellaneous other tasks around the farm. Jonathan is the consummate multitasker. He has chickens and a rooster (Fat Guy was given the task of letting the chickens out of the coop; you should have seen the quick look of panic that came over him before he quickly recovered and put on his poker face.)
Yes I know that's the rooster and not a chicken.
Jonathan also has a massive stone oven in which he bakes bread on weekends. He also teaches baking classes on some weekdays, so we got to watch him build a fire today in preparation for tomorrow's class. Here's Jonathan standing before the beast.
And here he is out in the pasture checking on the readiness of the hay.
Also in the pasture, Momo (our bulldog) and the cows enjoyed one another's company, engaging in several prolonged staring contests.
Not sure what they were thinking as they watched him walk off the field.
Finally, the makings of our lunch and cheese-tasting, which we enjoyed with Jonathan and his very lovely dance-instructor and business-manager wife.
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