Its not all Brie and Crackers

We're extremely thankful to the Pacific Northwest Cheese Project for their article on up-and-coming cheese makers that featured Catesby Farms this week. I consider it to be the number one blog on cheesemaking and is always packed with fascinating and informative news. The article captured exactly what most people who look at this from the outside, or those looking to start cheesemaking, don't necessarily realize - that the cheesemaking itself is just the icing on the cake and that the steps required to get to that point are many, and riddled with both humor and frustration.

We were fortunate in that we went into this venture with our eyes wide open, knowing exactly what was involved and ultimately how much time and money it was going to cost us before we would be seeing our packaged product on store shelves.

Of course there is an easier way to do this - you simply buy the milk in large quantities and forego the entire livestock operation, but then you miss out on so much and ultimately have less control over your final product than you would imagine. What were the animals eating? Were they housed in a building that would stress them? Were they organically raised? By being able to control the entire process from animal birth to what they eat, you have total control over your final product, and that to us is critical.

This week is an important one. We not only have our engineers doing their site evaluation and preparation for our new lagoon, but this coming weekend we will be selling off a good number of our lambs and hopefully getting things ready for haying. Reducing the flock will enable us to better manage what we have, plus we need to undertake the next round of worming, etc and its easier to do 50 sheep than 135 of them!

The dam went in at the weekend. The creek that runs alongside the house (Morgan Creek) has a dam (Yoder Dam) that can be constructed and deconstructed seasonally that raises the water level about 4ft for irrigation. We have rights to pump water and irrigate our pasture which means we are able to get a second and third hay cutting on some of the fields.