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curdnerd

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    http://www.cowsoutside.com

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  • Location
    Between Vernon, NJ & Warwick, NY
  1. Rachel, I'm very jealous that you got to see the show before we did, although we did get to see the original, I suppose. Tony was a blast to work with--a real professional. I hope that he can come back up in fair weather, too, someday.
  2. Hey, folks, I'm going to weigh in here to correct a few notions. 1. I'm not sure where someone got the idea that we were in the veal business. We do from time to time eat the odd bull-calf, and we do have some steers living the good life while awaiting their fate at 29 months, but we are not planning on eating any of this year's bull-calves: they are all good breeding stock, being fathered by John, our legendary Kerry bull. So sorry, no yummy grass-fed veal this year, these boys can look forward to living for heifer and heifer. 2. There is a world of difference between industrial veal and grass-fed veal. I am not aware of any Humane Society policy towards the abolition of all veal, although they are rightly concerned with the abuses that are integral to industrial veal. We have been visited once by the Humane Society, and just the other day we had a visit from a NJDA vet, who told me that our cows look pretty fat. (He was here on a complaint, from a local who seems to think that cows need to eat grain, and was concerned that our cows "are so hungry that they are eating grass". Oy vey.) 3. The only groups that I know of who are opposed to grass-fed veal are those who, like their fundamentalist bedfellows on the Right, wish to prescribe their particular worldview on society as a whole. To both of these groups, I have similar advice: if you don't like meat, don't eat any. Although we do not plan on eating any of the boys in 2005, we do have some piglets, just arrived, who are going to be feasting on the whey that our already grass-fat calves are spurning, along with unsold Bobolink breads and acres and acres of burdock, clover, and yes, pigweed. Oh, BTW, there are a whole slew of photos of our critters, here: <http://www.cowsoutside.com/index.htm> Sorry about the poor organization of the photos, but I'm making cheese daily and there's just so many hours in the day. See you at Union Square some Friday! Jonathan
  3. It's spelt "C'nedra", the stubborn redhead (redundant?) Imperial Tolnedran Princess, born of a dryad mother, in David Edding's "Belgariad"
  4. Found at the end of the pigroast: one Radio Shack stereo audio micro phone plug "Y" adaptor.
  5. Pooh: You'll be pleased to know that I have a cow named Eeyore. See you on Sunday!
  6. I'd like to clarify a point that might ghave been clouded by the cobwebs of my mind last night, as I unwound my post into the computer: the health and well-being of the cows expresses itself directly on the palate, if the cheesemaker didn't make any mistakes in process. So, by extension, what's inside the wrapper tells you more about the sustainability of the cheese than adjectives on the label. Alice has a good palate, and she does indeed buy uncertified products when her palate tells her that ther'es real quality in there.
  7. A few comments from a cheesemaker who started small, grew to medium-size, and now has started over again, and plans to stay small this time around. We've got 20 cows now, and plan to grow to no more that 40 or 50 in the long run. From an engineering point of view, a cheesemaker converts milk->cheese->cash, with the two arrows representing "transfer functions". The first arrow means buying and transporting milk, adding labor, energy, capital equipment amortization, incidental ingredients, and packaging, and turning out a product. If it is an aged cheese, then there is a second phase to this function, namely the ripening room, which is essentially another capital cost, energy cost, plus a 2-18 month time lag. The second function is the marketing of the cheese, which can be as simple as a cigar box and cooler out by the farm gate, or as complex as warehouses, distributors, salespeople, bill collectors, etc. If the cheesemaker is also farming the milk, then the first function really has three phases: Cows->pastures/feed system->milk production->cheesemaking->ripening->marketing. One of the biggest challenges of profitability in the cheese biz is the fact that these transfer functions have lots and lots of discontinuities, where a change in input causes a disproportionate change in output. For example, consider a simple case of a transfer function, a garden hose. Turn on the faucet and out comes the water. Turn it a little, get a little, turn it more and you get a lot. The amount of water that flows is a function of the turn of the handle, provided that you stay within the limits of the hose size and the water pressure. If you turn the faucet up all the way, and you aren't getting enough water, then you need a bigger pipe and higher water pressure from your well. Once you upgrade your plumbing, you're back to having a proportional transfer function, with a new, higher maximum. Back to the cheese biz: Let's say I start making cheese with one cow, as a hobby. The cow gives me 40 lbs of milk/day, and I make cheese every day in my five-gallon stockpot, and I end up with 4 lbs of cheese each day. After 2 months, I've got 240 lbs of nicely ripe cheese, with another 4 lbs arriving each day. So, I start giving cheese away to my friends, and bartering with it for vegetables, the eye doctor, the mechanic, etc. At some point I realize that 4 lbs/day is an awful lot of cheese to move, if you cannot legally sell it, so I realize that I can either give up my hobby, risk incarceration, or go "legal", which means getting licensed to produce cheese for sale. This is the first place where the trobules begin: in order to pass inspection even in the most lenient jurisdiction, I have to spend some real bucks to build a facility that meets code: washdown floor with drains into an approved septic, washable walls, stainless steel vat with smooth welds and an approved outlet valve ($1200 just for the valve!). Next, since I'm spending all this cash on a facility, I need to start paying myself for my labor, unless I happen to have a trust fund, which alas, I don't. A well-known cheesemaker of means likes to quip "if you want to make a small fortune in cheese, start with a large one". So, the question is, how much cheese do I need to make in order to make a living? The cost of labor in cheesemaking is nearly a fixed cost: it costs the same to stir a 5 gallon vat as it does to stir a 500 gallon vat, but in the latter case you have a lot more cheese to bar the cost. So there's some good news, labor cost per lb goes down as batch size goes up. Your milk cost starts out high, when you're buying just a few gallons at a time, and it gets lower as you move up toward buying by the hundred or thousand gallons. However, while it might be easy to find a farmer to sell you your 5 gallons of milk each day, if you need 50 or 100, the farmer won't be so eager, since you might endanger his volume premium, a little crumb of extra cash that the milk processors pay to farmers for producing a higher volume of milk. (of course, they do this to help keep the supply up and therefore prices low) Also, while you can carry the 5 gallons in the back of your Volvo wagon, when you are talking about 100 gallons or more, it gets pretty hard to turn the corner, slosh, slosh. So, the milk supply has discontinuities: in other words, there are many ranges of bach size that just don't work. Now let's look at sales: If you can sell all of your product out of a cooler with a cigar box on top at the roadside, then you have a truly perfect frictionless market, where stuff goes away and is replaced by cash. However, unless you live in a high-traffic area with no crime, this methodology probably won't work beyond, say, 5 lbs/day. So now you decide to have market hours, either at the dairy or at one or more farmer's markets. Now you have some cost of sales: counter help, market fees, travel, packaging, and oy, vey,shrinkage: most markets make you pre-cut and wrap your cheese, soif you don't sell it, it gets dry and ugly within a week, unless you cryovac it, in which case it stays the same for a few weeks. It's dead, of course, but at least it's stable. Ah, now it gets complicated: you must have enough cheese to support your sales channel. If you go to a market with 10 lbs of cheese, and sell it all for $200, you'll probably have trouble paying your sales person. So you'll need at least 25-50 lbs per market day in order to cover the fixed costs of being in a market. And, as you grow, you can start selling at multiple markets, but again, you have to have the volume to support them. Again, there are sizes that just don't work on the sales side, too. Now, to make things even more complicted, let's say that you're farming the milk yourself. Now, instead of deciding how much milk to buy and how often to make cheese, now you decide each year how many cows you'll be milking, and you hope and pray for the right mix of sun and rain to keep your grass growing. Soil, you should know, tends to become alternately mud and dust, but it only grows grass during the transitions. In other words, your milk supply becomes what the insurance industry likes to refer to as an act of God. So, how does ANYONE actually make a living making cheese? It's not easy, but it can be done, we're doing it, I'm pleased as punch to say. Bu it requires a thorough udersanding of all the transfer functions that conned rain to soil to grass to cows to calves to milk to cheese to the cave to the market to the palate, where the transfer function becomes transubstantiaton, as fat and protein become stuff of the soul. Back to Alice Waters. One of my most prized possessions is a thank you note that she sent me for some cheese that I had sent to her. She, along with Jean-Louis Palladin are special people to me, for the impact that they hav had on food and agriculture in America. I only hope that her comments to the cheese society included the term "grassfed" along with the word "organic". Organic milk produced by confining cows indoors and feeding them organically raised grain is NOT what the founders of the movement had in mind. I keep telling people that the best way to change how food is grown in this world is to vote with your teeth. Chicken that costs 69 cents/lb, or cheddar that costs four bucks a pound has social costs, in the environment, the agricultural community, and right at home in your liver. Cheap food is what got us into the mire, and paying more for real quality, as only your palate can define it, is what is going to get us out.
  8. Water we have, really good deep well water with no Cl added. Probably better than the bottled stuff, and free, free, free. The bread-and-cheese shop will be open until at least 5 PM, and people can leave orders in the bakehouse (68F) or ripening room (55F) to keep it cold. 80 people, eh? We're going to need a volunteer to coordinate parking. We've got lots of space, but a parking czar will avoid problems.
  9. Ok, I guess I oughta weigh in here: 1. Dogs: dogs are explicitly uninvited, no exceptions. Sorry, but we earn our living courtesy of the good humor of our cows and calves, and while they found Fat Guy's dog cute and adorable, multiple dogs and cows make for trouble. And then there's the issue of Hannah, our Akita-mutt cowdog, who is very, very protecive of her cow buddies. So, no dogs, with regrets. 2. Mac and Cheese: I really hink that Nina and I can manage to make a few rays of mac and cheese, afer all, we have the big ole oven, and we also happen to have lotsa cheese. 3. Kids are welcome, we have three of our own, and a trampoline to boot. I should point out that a farm is a great place for kids to have fun, but it is also a place rife with potential dangers for kids turned loose. It ought to be understood that kids need to be supervised, or even better, organized into some sort of supervised activities, if the numbers are large. 4. Inclement weather: now that we're at the 65+ stage, we;ve probably outgrown Bobolink's 10X20 market awning. We have a bunch of 10X10 awnings as well, so perhaps we can concatenate them all together into a Big Top. 5. Bread and cheese: I wish we could afford to offer to provide bread and cheese for the masses (huddled, if the weather is inclement). We can certainly make a killer mac-and-cheese (we use cutting-room scraps and other odd bits of unsalable but otherwise wholesome and delectable cheese), and if there's soem bread left over from the Sunday market we can probably pitch some of that in, too. We can keep our cheese shop open for the first hour or two of the event, to allow folks to taste and hopefully purchase mass quantities. 6. It'll come to me.....
  10. 12:30 might be tight--how about 1:30? Also, if we need more people to make the numbers work, allk I'd have to do is let the local word-of-mouth know, and we'd probably get a lot of our regular cognospendi to show up.
  11. We actually do have a public number: 973-764-4888. It connects to an answering machine, which gives our hours, directions to the farm, how to find us on the web, and will even take a message, we we will return, eventually. But rarely will a human ever answer it. People who come to the farm, on the other hand, get our full attention.
  12. Other than Sept 7, we're good for most weekends in September, with Sunday being significantly better than Saturday for us: Sat we're open to the public from 9-5, and also bake and staff four farmer's markets, so we're stretched to the limits. Sundays are a bit easier, as we're not open to the public until noon, and only have one off-farm market to supply. Also, on Sunday the oven is free after 3, where on Saturday we re-fire the oven as soon as we're done baking. Either day, please note that we are not in a position to provide much setup/cleanup service, as we're stretched pretty much to the max already. We do, however, have lots of outdoor space, an alternate rain space (either in a hayloft or under a 10X20 ez-up tent, parking, water, one bathroom, a 55 degree walk-in, a 35 degree reach-in, 2 commercial bbq grills, some tables, about 10 chairs, etc. There is a rental place nearby if we need more stuff, but agian, we'll need some help with logistics from some of you. On a Sunday, the oven will be at about 400-450F after 1 PM, and it measures 42X48 inside, which can probably cook off a lot of side dishes. We're located on the State Line, between Vernon, NJ and Warwick, NY, about an hour from Bergen County, and about 1.5 hours from Midtown. We can probably provide an overnight kip for the pig-tender and/or a coordinator (you know, the person who keeps us out of the operational end of the event!)
  13. We've got a backyard.....and a really big oven for the sides. Actually, we could stuff a whole pig in there. Is the Fink in question Al's son?
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