Say cheese

MARIA TRUMPLER, LEFT, Jim Crawford, Brianna Parke, Cindy Crawford and Sherry Crawford are producing a farmstead cheese at the Crawford Family Farm in Whiting.

Independent photo/Trent Campbell

By JOHN FLOWERS

WHITING — After more than a half-century of dairying on their 310-acre farm on the Sawyer Needham Road in Whiting, the Crawford family had come to a crossroads last year.

Their dependable farmhand, Clarence Birchmore, had recently died following a heart attack after more than 40 years of devoted service.

Milk prices were continuing to plummet, while energy prices were steadily increasing.

“Farmers in the past could get by, by working hard,” said Jim Crawford, who with his sister, Cindy, took over the Crawford Family Farm 1997. “Now, not even 15-hour days are going to do it.”

That’s when the family looked to a few shining stars among its 70-head dairy herd to lead the farm back into profitability.

Those two-dozen Ayrshire cows — selected for their robust health and for the high butterfat content of their milk — are now churning out the essential ingredients for the Crawfords’ “Vermont Ayr” farmstead cheese, a product that is quickly gaining popularity in Addison County and throughout New England.

It’s a budding operation that got rolling last year, thanks to a chance meeting with cheese maker Maria Trumpler. Trumpler had been dividing her time between her Orwell farm and a career as a college educator. She’d been looking to immerse herself more fully into cheese making, a craft she’d been studying for several years.

“I needed a source of raw milk,” Trumpler recalled.

The Crawfords — looking to develop value-added products for their milk — were only too happy to accommodate Trumpler, whom they met through the Golden Russet Farm in Shoreham. She was pleased with the Crawford Family Farm’s milk and suggested a partnership in a new farmstead cheese operation.

Before long, they all put together a business plan. Jim Crawford and some contractors got to work transforming the farm’s rustic, 1910 barn into a small cheese making facility.

Last Thanksgiving, the Crawford Family Farm produced its first run of Vermont Ayr cheese. Made in eight-inch rounds, the cheese is described by Trumpler as a “semi-hard tomme” that one might find in the Swiss Alps — light, lemony and nutty, with a creamy aftertaste.

Each cheese round possesses a grayish rind that develops during a three-month aging process in the farm’s climate-controlled “cave.” The cave temperature is kept at a constant 55 degrees, year-round.

In March, Vermont Ayr cheese hit the shelves of the Middlebury Natural Foods Coop. Demand has remained steady ever since, prompting the Crawfords to recently double cheese production to 800 pounds per month.

“We’re trying really hard to keep up with demand,” Trumpler said. “The majority of people who taste it, buy it.”

Trumpler cited several factors she believes makes Vermont Ayr cheese stand apart from other farmstead varieties.

First, the cheese is made from Ayrshire cows’ milk. Trumpler explained that most farmstead cheese producers tend to use milk from Jersey cows. While Jerseys produce an excellent milk high in butterfat content, that fat tends to rise quickly to the top of the vat during the cheese making process, requiring that that the milk be agitated frequently to reincorporate the butterfat.

Ayrshire cows, on the other hand, produce milk with very small butterfat globules that stay well incorporated in the milk and produce a cheese that the Crawfords say is uniquely smooth, creamy and sweet.

While the cheese is not organic, the Crawfords’ cows are pasture-fed during the warm months and are not treated with bovine growth hormones.

Vermont Ayr cheese has already found its way into the Massachusetts and Connecticut markets. With demand steadily growing, the Crawfords have been evaluating their capacity to make even more of their product. Their goal is to reserve, for cheese production, 40 percent of the 1.25 million pounds of milk the farm generates each year. That would translate into roughly 40,000 pounds of Vermont Ayr cheese annually.

“The goal is, by getting value-added dollars from cheese, we can decrease the number of cows (on the farm) and increase sales,” Jim Crawford explained.

Milk the Crawfords don’t use for cheese making is sold through the St. Albans Dairy Cooperative.

The Crawfords are far from the only Vermont dairy farmers to seize cheese as a value-added life preserver from plunging milk prices.

Byron Moyer, chief of the dairy section for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, said there are currently around 40 farmstead dairy operations in the state currently making “standardized and artisanal cheeses.” That number is up from a mere four or five farmstead cheese operations only 10 years ago, according to Moyer.

“I anticipate that trend to continue,” Moyer said.

And there’s more than enough demand to bring more producers into the market, Moyer added.

That’s good news for the Crawfords.

“We’re very excited about the tremendous potential,” Cindy Crawford said.