While large, industrial cheesemakers are known for consistency and scale, small operations like Uplands Cheese make boutique cheeses unique to the land where they’re produced.
And these small, pasture-based dairy farms have their own unique concerns when it comes to climate change.
So, how is extreme weather already affecting operations like Uplands Cheese? How does climate factor into future planning for a 300-acre dairy farm?
Cheesemaker Andy Hatch is Co-Owner at Uplands, a dairy farm and cheesemaking operation in Southern Wisconsin. Andy’s team produces two award-winning artisan cheeses, Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Rush Creek Reserve.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Andy joins Ross to explain why his team uses a seasonal model for cheesemaking, describing how Pleasant Ridge Reserve is made in the tradition of Alpine cheeses while Rush Creek is modeled after Vacherin Mont d’Or.
Andy discusses how warmer, wetter weather is impacting his cows and what Uplands Cheese is doing to reduce its carbon footprint.
Listen in for insight on trends in dairy farming influenced by climate change and learn how to support small dairy farmers like Andy who are good stewards of natural resources.
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Liz Thorpe on Reversing Climate Change S3EP31
The Book of Cheese by Liz Thorpe
Dan Saladino on Reversing Climate Change S3EP16
Eating to Extinction by Dan Saladino
Jasper Hill Farm Bayley Hazen Blue
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori and one of the co-founders there. Today I have with me Andy Hatch, owner and cheesemaker at Upland’s Cheese Company. You may have had their cheese from whole foods like Pleasant Ridge Reserve and Rush Creek Reserve. Hey, Andy. Hey, Ross. Hey, I had to refresh myself on your cheese. I thought we were going to do the show a couple of months ago, so I had to eat some cheese.
And then now that we’ve scheduled it for now, past the holiday rush, I had to go get some more cheese. So some part of your cheese income is derived from me. Yeah, we saw a bump in Seattle and wondered. Yeah, both of them are great. Liz Thorpe was on the show recently talking about cheese generally and climate change. A big fan of your work from what I could tell and connected us. And she says nice things about your cheese in her book too. Have you ever seen that?
Her book of cheese?
Andy Hatch: She has a couple. I’ve got them up on the bookshelf. She knows what she’s talking about. I would have said that even before she paid us compliments, but... Yeah, she’s a leading light in our industry and has an interesting perspective now because she doesn’t run a day-to-day business like she used to. So I think she’s above the fray a little bit of commerce and she’s a good one to go to for perspective on industry trends and stuff like that because she can sort of float around and dip in about.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and you’re on the other hand quite busy working Yeah. Knee deep in way. And so you can.
Andy Hatch: Yeah. I get the, this is the time of year I get big picturey, you know, a month ago, everything was six inches from my nose, shipping holiday orders and that kind of thing. But we slow way down in the winter. So, uh, conversations like this are kind of a natural part of our cycle in the winter. And then we get busy again in the spring deal with the day to day for now zooming out. That’s what we look forward to really this time of year.
Ross Kenyon: I was wondering to what degree people who don’t know much about cheese making or dairy generally think about the seasonality of cheese. Even the fact that you just said now is a slow season, you would have thought with industrial scale cheese making, seasons no longer matter. But it seems like from what I can tell from eating your cheeses, which are both delicious that I’ve had, and also reading your website, it seems like seasonality is actually something that you may perceive as being lost to cheese making broadly and are trying to recover.
Is that correct?
Andy Hatch: Yes, largely that’s true. Certainly with, you know, scaled up cheese making and most of the cheese making in this country, cows are milked year round, cheeses are made year round. And, you know, to optimize efficiency and achieve scale, that’s the way you do it. We run counter to that trend for a couple of reasons. You know, one of them is lifestyle, but Which is a little indulgent, but also I think... What does that mean? Like you want vacation time or what? You know, we pay to take the winter off.
We stopped milking our cows for a couple of months, stopped making cheese. We’re still feeding cows and that costs money. Now, we’re not wealthy enough that we can just afford to burn through cash all winter. We’ve had to shape the business to make it work financially. We didn’t write the book. It’s an old model. You calve your cows in the spring when pasture comes up, and that’s the cheap time to make milk. They’re feeding on pasture spring, summer, fall, so we harvest all that grass with our cows, turn it into cheese, bank that cheese away in the cheese caves to age for a year, and then when milk production gets expensive in the winter, We take a pass on it, shrink everything down, shrink our costs, hibernate.
And we’ve got, you know, the season’s worth of cheese in the caves appreciating, you know, getting more flavorful, becoming more valuable. And we’re able to sell that year round and generate, you know, we’re not getting rich, but family supporting income. So, I mean, there are trade-offs, obviously. We work seven days a week, April through November. And so you pay for it. You work really hard and then live off the fruits of that labor through the winter months. So economically, you’ve got to make it work.
Lifestyle-wise, you’ve got to be able to absorb the intense months in order to have the quiet months. And then I think the third dimension is The cheese itself is, I think we’re trying to make cheeses that are unique to our farm. And the best way to do that is to make cheeses that nobody else could make. And so making a certain type of cheese only during a certain type of year from your own herd of cows is always going to be more reflective of the cows and the farm, their diet, that time of year.
It’s going to be more unique. Rather than say, you know, buying milk from a bunch of different farms, making the same cheese year round, those kinds of systems homogenize and scale, but they don’t create the kind of distinctive character that we’re after.
Ross Kenyon: Is that sort of the difference between getting your cheese from the deli case versus the cheese kiosk or a specialty store or most of the specialty cheeses vertically integrated in that way?
Andy Hatch: No, it doesn’t have to be. I mean, there’s some grocery stores with really interesting cheese. You know, especially these days, you’ve got some good ones in Seattle, PCC, Metro Market, Whole Foods. Those are bigger, those are chains of stores, but they still got some rare seasonal products.
Ross Kenyon: I love Derek Cheesecake. I meant more like once they’re slicing off of a big block next to the board’s head. Is that the split or not really?
Andy Hatch: Yeah, that’s the other side of the divide. And we’ve got a lot of that in Wisconsin, obviously. Big scaled up production. And I am not claiming that our way of doing it is better. Those businesses are the backbone of our whole economy. They support a lot of cows, support a lot of acres, support a lot of families. A lot of those factories will make more in a day than we make in a year. So it’s just a different game altogether. And if I were running a business that size, I would be homogenized and, you know, scaled up and efficient and year round too.
That’s just, you know, I think the way you play that game.
Ross Kenyon: So your interest in cheese, maybe it’s fair to say, comes from wanting to make something unique to your land, unique to your cow, something that couldn’t be done elsewhere. That sounds like a big risk and a challenge too. The homogenized enormous operation in some ways seems simpler and less risky than something so boutique in orientation. Is that even the right way to frame this?
Andy Hatch: Yeah, probably. I mean, those businesses have to take risk in terms of borrowing money and, you know, they have some of those same problems, but I think it’s less interesting to a guy like me. I like, you know, tinkering. I like nuance. I like figuring out those kinds of problems. And I mean, a farm like this is just nonstop full of Those kinds of problems. You’re dealing with weather, all the farming side of it, and making cheese with raw milk and a natural rind, constant learning, experimenting.
That’s what turns me on. I also think it makes really interesting, delicious cheese, and that’s important, just to make the work meaningful. But yeah, it is risky. We work all summer, put away all that cheese, and it better be good. Oh my God, that’s scary. It’s next year’s income, but sure, winemakers do the same thing. Yeah, maybe you should be a seasonal podcaster. Just bank up a year’s worth of them.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, the shows during the holidays are more expensive, of course, because you have to pull me away from my family and doing nothing. So I get hazard pay during that time. Yeah, maybe I should experiment. I’ll pitch that next to... I was thinking maybe since we’re talking about the taste of the cheese, you can help guide me a little bit. I have Liz’s description of Pleasant Ridge Reserve. I also had, I think I ate an entire wheel of the Rush Creek Reserve too, but that was a little earlier.
And a little more distant in my palate’s memory at this point. We should talk about that one too. But the term, this might expose me as a cheese neophyte, but the term that Liz uses that really stands out to me is fudgy. This is probably the fudgiest cheese I’ve had. And that might be, maybe you’ll bristle against that. You call my cheese fudgy, man? Yes, fudgy. Is that like, uh, Liz was saying like everyone’s going for like butterscotchy flavors now and like that sort of thing is in some ways become an industry standard, but like this type of this like texture, the way it feels against my teeth, it does remind me of, it’s like the closest cheese I’ve had to fudge.
Is that, is that?
Andy Hatch: That’s legit. Yeah. Yes.
Ross Kenyon: I like that term better. Okay. Yeah.
Andy Hatch: Yeah. I mean, you could say toothsome, but that’s a bit much for a Midwesterner. The texture, it’s a description of texture, right? And I’d like for Pleasant Ridge to be able, you can sort of smush it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, a creamy paste. And... You know, that I think combined with the cheese should be savory, right? And with an acid to kind of make your mouth water. And so you have this mouthwatering, fudgy, rich paste. That’s kind of what we’re after.
And those savory flavors, kind of chicken broth, meat. So... You know, Liz’s point about a lot of modern American cheese trending towards butterscotch is just trending towards sweetness. And that’s really, I think, no different than most of the rest of our food system. It’s cheese is fat, fatty, salty, and sweet that for a lot of people ticks, you know, the boxes. And you can kind of fake sweetness in cheese by, you know, Added starter cultures, bacteria that you’d add to milk during cheesemaking to kind of generate those sweet flavors.
These kind of rich umami savory flavors you’d find in a cheese like Pleasant Ridge and other aged raw milk cheeses, you can’t really fake in the same way. And so I think that makes them a little bit more unusual. Especially in the landscape of American cheese. So Pleasant Ridge Reserve, the cheese you’re eating and talking about is our own recipe. We gave it our own name. Our farm is up on Pleasant Ridge. That’s what we named it after. But it’s our interpretation of what you call an Alpine style cheese.
So classic examples of that are Gruyere, Comte, Appenzeller, Beaufort, cheeses that came out of the French and Swiss Alps. So it’s an original cheese, but it’s made very much in that tradition. But the best versions of those cheeses from France and Switzerland from the Alps are aged raw milk cheeses from cows on summer mountain pastures. And so they are always going to taste like the place they came from. Our cheese should always taste like the place it came from. And that really is where I talked about being somebody who gets into nuance and variability.
That’s what’s exciting about cheeses like this, I think, is they taste like place and, you know, they change over time, season to season. It’s interesting. I think it’s You know, enjoyable as a consumer and as a producer to deal with something like that. I don’t think I’m somebody that celebrates variability for variability’s sake, but when you’re going after flavor complexity and a taste of place, the variability just comes along with it, I think.
Ross Kenyon: It’s interesting to note your influence with alpine cheeses because those are associated, and maybe this is unfair, but with extreme seasonality, You’re living in these mountain valleys. And then as soon as it’s clear up there, the cows go up and they’re eating the, the only flower I could think of that might grow up there is Edelweiss, which that’s like the only thing I could even, they’re eating the obscure mountain herbs that come out for a short time before the snow covers them up. And then they come back down and that’s peasant food for the winter.
And that’s like the seasonality of cheese. And that’s something that you’re trying to even bring back even at Personal, familial cost, even though it sounds like you probably need and deserve a break during that time too.
Andy Hatch: Yeah, that’s a spectacular system they have, and they’ve been doing it for a thousand years. I am in awe of what they do in the Alps. Modernity has not spared them either. They have a harder time finding young cheesemakers to go up into the mountains for the summer. They’re facing all the same labor issues. We are here and people who want to, you know, rather swipe at a phone than, you know, make a vat of cheese. But they created the model. It’s really special what they do there.
And we’re obviously not on an elk, but it’s the same mentality. Harvesting, you know, summer pasture is And distilling it into that flavor into cheese. How much of an influence does the rawness have? I think both of the cheeses named are raw cheeses, right? Yeah. Yeah. Both, both of our cheeses are made with raw milk. It’s an enormous influence.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Why, why do you do it? Imagine someone doesn’t know anything about it. Why wouldn’t you patch your eyes?
Andy Hatch: To make cheese with more flavor. And more distinctive flavor. So cheese basically is a clump of fat and protein. And as a cheese ages, anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of years, as it ages, those fats and proteins are metabolized and become aroma and flavor. Well, what metabolizes them? Bacteria. And in the case of pasteurized cheese, the bacteria present to work on those fats and proteins and create flavor is Those bacteria are introduced by a commercial starter, like a cake mix or a spice mix into a pot of soup.
So you bring the milk in, you pasteurize it, kill all the living bacteria, add certain strains of predictable bacteria and generate a cheese that’s going to taste predictable. By contrast, raw milk, unpasteurized milk, You know, arrives to the cheesemaker with a whole array of native bacteria and a far greater diversity than a cheesemaker could introduce with commercial culture. And so the far, the greater diversity of bacteria that you start with translates to a greater flavor complexity in the finished cheese. You simply have more tools in the toolbox, more types of bacteria that are going to metabolize fats and proteins.
In different ways, each in their own way to create more and different types of flavor and aroma. So that was a long winded way of saying, you know, more flavor complexity. So why doesn’t everybody do it? Well, You need to have confidence that the bacteria in your raw milk is flavorful and doesn’t present food safety issues. And the best way to do that is to control the cows or the goats or the sheep, to have control over the quality of that milk. And so in our case, we only make cheese out of milk from our own cows.
We have control and confidence in the quality of that milk. It doesn’t make us better than another cheesemaker who pasteurizes his milk. And if we were buying milk from multiple different farms the way most cheesemakers do, I would probably pasteurize it too. It’s not like a moral crusade. It’s just a way to make more interesting cheese. And if you can do it, if your circumstances are right, you’ve got the milk that can do it. It makes better cheese. What would the Pleasant Ridge Reserve taste like if you had pasteurized it and introduced bacterial cultures?
Yeah, great question. Subdued, I think we’d still find a way to make it delicious, but I think it would probably be more consistent. You’d see less variability batch to batch, season to season, but I think you’d see sand off the edges of what makes it really interesting. But of course, there are other cheeses made in this style with pasteurized milk that are delicious. I don’t think you can’t make delicious cheese with pasteurized milk, but I was saying before, and I know it sounds just kind of like brochure copy, but our aim is to make cheese that tastes like our farm.
That really is our competitive strategy in the market. If we were going to pasteurize our milk and make Another generic version of what everybody else makes. Cheddar, Jack, Colby, Gruyere. Now we’re out there competing with everybody else on price, marketing budget, things like that. Better for small producers like us to make something that nobody else can make, you know, be a category of one. Well, how do you make something that nobody else can make? You use raw milk from your own cows when they’re eating your own pasture.
That’s the business strategy behind it, is to do something that nobody else can copy.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think if you were trying to compete with an enormous cheese manufacturer a more generic cheese, I think you’d have to get big or get out as the farming expression goes. I’d have to shave my beard and go on the road and bang the sales drum. Talk to supermarket buyers. Oh, yeah. My cheese is four-tenths of a penny cheaper than what you’re getting from over here and blah, blah, blah. No, I find it to be... The cheese makes me think. And one element of it, too, that I like that you singled out is the presence of acid, too, because typically fat and acid don’t go together in the natural world, as far as I know.
But cheese does. Cheese has that. I feel like it’s a very balanced thing all together. And it’s very Moorish, too. I keep wanting to, like, I tested a lot of cheeses for Liz’s. Yours were the ones that made me among the ones that made me the happiest. And I have a hard time palate wise explaining exactly why that is. She did mention in there that she has flavors of red fruit and papaya up front, followed by chicken stock. I guess you did mention the chicken stock.
It makes me feel like a novice that I’m not getting the fruitiness to it. Do you detect a lot of fruitiness in there too?
Andy Hatch: Well, I mentioned, you know, this variability that’s inherent with raw milk cheese, particularly aged raw milk cheese. Think of it the same way you think of different vintages of wine coming from a producer that has minimal intervention. So sometimes Pleasant Ridge trends more towards sweetness and other times, you know, more towards savoriness. Our model, one herd of cows on rotationally grazed pasture, unpasteurized milk, leaves us open to that variability. And so it may be that the cheese in front of you now just happens to be a more savory batch, not quite as sweet.
The real magic, I mean, when you land on a really special batch of Pleasant Ridge or of Gruyere, you know, that interplay between savory, sweet, and acid, and I mean, that’s the real magic. When you have a good batch of... There’s real complexity and not every batch finds it.
Ross Kenyon: When you have a batch like that for the Pleasant Ridge Reserve, does it become the Pleasant Ridge Reserve Reserve? Is that a dumb joke?
Andy Hatch: No, but we get excited about it. And we’re just now starting to taste the 2022s, the stuff we made, you know, starting in May. And yeah, it’s always like a discussion here. You’ll find one that is like special. You’ll find a dozen, the 20 that are like special. It’s like, well, do you sell them or you just, sometimes we just hold on to them because we want to watch them age and change. And it’s exciting. It’s fun to Stay with them for a while longer.
And then we have certain customers who want to select their own batch of these. Curious guy like you, you would enjoy that kind of exercise. They’ll either come out to our farm or sometimes we’ll send them pieces. So next time we do a podcast together, we’d send you a piece each from like eight different batches. And it could be, you know, scattered throughout the summer. A couple of June batches, July, August. They’re all going to taste slightly different and you pick your favorite one.
And if you were, you know, De Laurenti or some store in Seattle, we would put your name on that batch and only sell it to you. Wow. That’s probably what happens to most of the, you know, the most sublime batches will get set aside for customers who care enough to go through that kind of selection process.
Ross Kenyon: The only time I’ve experienced that type of variability was between various manufacturers of Roquefort, where I had one that came from one particular maker. And that was the first cheese I had. It was from De Laurenti too. It’s the first cheese I had where I got blue cheese. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. The salt crystals and It was beautiful. And then I had a bunch of other Roqueforts that were from a different maker that I’m just like chasing that feeling forever.
I’ve never found it. Chasing the dragon. Chasing the dragon. Where is it? Where is this cheese? So like, that’s the only variability I’ve encountered. But it’s between makers and not within vintage. And maybe I need to have like a vertical taste test of various cheeses. I can do that with like Gouda or other things that I’ve seen that have like six months, 12 months, 18 months, three year. I need to develop my pod in that way.
Andy Hatch: Yeah. It’s a fun exercise. Well, come to Wisconsin.
Ross Kenyon: Come to Wisconsin, eat that cheese. Yeah. What about the Rush Creek Reserve? This one is much different, which, by the way, I want to back up one second. The Pleasant Ridge Reserve, what type of commonly known cheese would you say this is closest to? Would you just say like a French or Swiss Alpine cheese?
Andy Hatch: Yeah, we use the phrase Alpine style cheese, and the people in the cheese industry, they get it right away. It’s not that common parlance, so... I would say like a Gruyere. Like Gruyere. What about the Rush Creek Reserve, which is certainly a much softer... Is it washed rind too? Yes. And it’s also wrapped in birch leaves? Yeah, spruce bark. Spruce bark. There we go. Got it. It grows that kind of white mottled mold, so it looks like a birch.
It looks exactly like birch tree. But yeah, that is the other side of the coin on our farm. So, you know, the summer... Spring, summer, fall, while the cows are grazing, we make Pleasant Ridge, which is, and I could talk about that later. You know, Pleasant Ridge, aged cheese like this is always going to show off the character of grass-fed milk more and better. But coming into the late fall, our cows start eating hay. Pasture growth slows down. You’ve got to supplement with hay.
That changes the character of the milk quite a bit. So the milk gets a lot richer, heavier in fat.
Ross Kenyon: Like grass-fed and grass-finished versus like corn-fed beef. Is it kind of like that? In some ways. Some ways it’s like a fattier content of it. Yeah.
Andy Hatch: Yeah, exactly. I mean, and the fact that they’re eating more hay and less pasture, I think diminishes the inherent flavor complexity of the milk. Because the diet’s just so much simpler. Yeah. Yes, it makes delicious milk, but it wouldn’t make as interesting of an aged cheese. But that extra texture, the fat you get that time of year makes for a wonderful soft cheese. So it’s the same kind of paradigm, looking at milk coming off of one particular farm during one part of the year and asking yourself, what’s the destiny of this milk?
What is the Character of this milk and the best way to express it. Well, on pasture it’s aged cheese and on hay it’s soft cheese. So for about two months every fall we make Rush Creek Reserve, this little soft cheese. And like our grazed milk going into an Alpine style cheese, soft cheese being made off of hay takes a page out of the old world cheesemaking calendar. This is, we didn’t write the book on this either. And when I was young and making the rounds as an apprentice, I worked in Eastern France making Comté.
And they then in the fall and winter make Vacherin Montdor. And Rush Creek is based on Vacherin Montdor. That cheese is not imported into this country. So you don’t see it that often, but, and it’s done there for the same reasons we do it. Character of the milk changes. Style of cheese should change along with it. So small, soft cheese wrapped in spruce bark. The bark’s there to hold together that little pillow of cheese. Otherwise, it’s so soft, it would sort of puddle out.
Is it not imported because it’s raw and it’s under 60 days aged? Is that what it is? Correct. That rule just breaks my heart. I’m sure yours too. No, it makes... I think I’m making... You rent-seek off of it and you’re happy for it. No, I wish we could eat French, Mondor. We have to age Rush Creek 60 days, which was an interesting exercise, but figuring out how to do that. Anyway, we make it in the fall, sell it all over the holidays.
We sell it November, December, and then that’s it until it comes out again following November. Pleasant Ridge has seasonal production. But we sell it year-round. Rush Creek is made seasonally and sold seasonally. It’s just sort of a big burst on the calendar.
Ross Kenyon: I went today, man. I tried to pick up another wheel so I could, or whatever you call those little rounds, have some in front of me. And sadly, the cheesemonger informed me this was not possible. Yes. I’ll have to wait until the next Christmas time. Yeah. Yeah. Are there other cheeses that you’re making or are those just the two mainstays? That’s it. Just the two. Wow. No, you don’t feel the pressure to introduce a number of other options?
Andy Hatch: I do. I mean, yeah. I mean, people ask all the time. It’s, you know, and it’s very American of us, isn’t it? Like, what’s new? What’s new? What’s new? Like, you wouldn’t go to a French or Italian cheese maker. What’s new? You know, you make what you make. That’s so funny. I would have associated that, but yeah, I would never do that. I get off on novelty just like everybody else. I just scratch that itch in other parts of my life, like, you know, playing a band, travel, like do other stuff to, you know, varieties, the spice of life.
I think, you know, yeah, we could make 12 different cheeses and we’d probably just water them all down into mediocrity just through scattered attention span and I like the simplicity of it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I respect the focus too. It is a very American desire. I’m sure you’ve had people being like, this is great. If I invest here, you could expand to 5,000 cows and do this. And you’re like, you don’t really get what we do here, do you? This is, you’d lose the thing. You’d kill the thing that you’re trying to save by doing.
Andy Hatch: We do that here though. I mean, you know, maybe someday I’ll do it. We need to expand our building. So, you know, like I said, wintertime, we have to kind of step back and talk about big picture stuff. So we spent all morning talking about, you know, we need to put up a new building. We’re just out of space, cave space to age cheese. All of a sudden you spend a bunch of money. You’ve got to grow to justify the, you know, new investment and off to the races.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You’re in that cycle once you start. Yeah. Yeah, the treadmill. I was hoping you’d try your hand at a blue, but it sounds like maybe that’s too much to expect. Do you like blues or I feel like there’s a little bit of a how disgusting can you make it chauvinism to the genre, but I very much love it.
Andy Hatch: I love them. I love Stilton. I would love to make a Stilton. Have you had the, I never had to say, is it Stichelton or Stitchleton? Yeah, Stitchleton. Yep. Stitchleton.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. The raw milk still, that was also one of the early cheeses. We had Dan Saladino on who wrote the Eating to Extinction book. He wrote a bunch about it and turned me on to it. That was one of the first cheeses I had where I was like, oh, this is sublime art right here.
Andy Hatch: Oh, yeah. And that is a good example. I mean... The two Stiltons I hold in the highest regard are Stitchleton and Colston Bassett Stilton, which is pasteurized and is consistently just beautiful. Stitchleton is raw milk. Yeah. It moves. When you get a sublime batch of Stitchleton, it’s the best.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, I got to order some. I’ll have to give the Colston Bassett a try. I see that at the grocery store and that’s a quite common one. But I feel like after reading Dan’s book, I was a little bit prejudiced against the more mainstream Stiltons. Like, I know the real stuff, man. Don’t come at me with this non-stitchels and cheese. I don’t think that’s wrong, though. And there’s a good one out of Vermont, Bailey Hazen Blue. Yeah, yeah. I see that one around.
I think I might have bought that one once, but I’ll revisit it if you are a fan.
Andy Hatch: Yeah, I know. There’s a neighbor of ours here who makes a much drier blue cheese, very subtle blue veining. It’s called Dunbarton Blue. He makes it like a cheddar, so it’s dry and flaky and pressed like a cheddar, but he introduces a blue mold to it. That’s a really cool cheese. I don’t know who in Seattle would have it.
Ross Kenyon: We got to talk about climate change. I’m happy to just talk about cheese forever for its own sake, because cheese is a beautiful thing and it deserves it and the entire show. And then something could just be about our love of cheese and me stealing all of your knowledge while I have you on the line. But I am curious how you’re thinking about climate change, if and how it’s affected any of your operations, any of your future planning has been impacted by it. You can start us any way you want, but how are you thinking about climate?
Andy Hatch: Yeah. We are thinking about it more and more. Six, five, six, seven years ago, I did not think much about it at all, other than what we’d read in the general newspaper and think about the issue at large. But in terms of what happens on our farm, we are seeing warmer, wetter, more extreme storms. And we’re pretty exposed in that regard as a business because our cows live outside year-round. Which is really unusual for dairy cows in this part of the country. So we dry them off this time of year, but they stay outside.
And it’s not the cold that’s hard on our cows. It’s really these wet mud seasons on the shoulders of winter, November and April. Mud seasons have gotten a lot worse. And so... We’re preparing to build a barn just to get the cows off the fields in the mud season. That was something that really wasn’t on our radar six, seven years ago. So for us, it’s a big investment. In the grand scheme of things, putting up a barn is not a huge deal, but it represents a shift in our priorities, something that we never thought we’d have to Spend money on.
Ross Kenyon: I never would have guessed that either. And I suspect most people listening would not have expected having to buy another barn or get a barn going because of mud.
Andy Hatch: We also want the roof for the summers because they’re hotter and more humid and our cows who are grazing, you know, they’re outside 365 days a year. These hotter, more humid summers are hard on them. We’d like a place to get them up into the shade midday in the summer. So, you know, you compare this to most modern dairy farms where cows are kept in barns 24-7. And I think, you know, those farms are susceptible to climate change by, you know, the impact on feed production.
They’re making all their feed out in the fields, big machines, bringing them into the barns, feeding the cows in a controlled environment, and then hauling all the manure out, spreading it on the fields. Our style of farming is kind of opposite. Our cows are out in the fields all year harvesting their own feeds. Spreading their own manure. So they’re out in the weather. It’s a long way of saying our cows are feeling, feel the weather every day. And as that weather is changing, it’s causing new sort of stress points for them.
So that’s, you know, that’s the main difference kind of on the ground. One step more removed, sort of larger business strategy. We’re becoming much more conscious of, like all people in businesses, I think, of our Carbon impact, our footprint as a business, and starting to ask ourselves, what is our carbon footprint, first of all? How can we improve it? What sort of expectations are going to be laid upon us by our customers, government, et cetera, in the future? And that one has been a challenge.
You know, we’ve not really found The carbon modeling for our business in which we feel confident in the data. And looking at Nori’s website, actually, I’m going to follow through with some of the businesses you’re linked with that provide that kind of third-party certification of carbon sequestration. And we’re trying to educate ourselves a lot more on that. My instinct, and maybe it’s just self-serving, is that a farm like ours is all perennial pasture, rotational grazing. That’s a big carbon sink, I think. I think that we have a lot going for us in that regard.
But, of course, cows living this kind of lifestyle are lower in production. They don’t make as much milk as the big modern Holstein kept in a barn year-round. So does that mean that the methane produced by our cows per pound of milk is actually greater than the big dairies with combining? That’s an interesting question. Counterintuitive, but possible. Yeah. And then you start to look at like cheese transportation. You know, we send cheese out to your neighborhood, Seattle, one pallet at a time. So a semi pulls into our farm.
We load a refrigerated trailer. We load a pallet on it. It goes back to a warehouse in central Wisconsin. They fill an entire truck, drive it to Seattle. Moving one pallet at a time around compared to moving full truckloads around. These big cheese factories in Wisconsin that I talked about, who make as much in a day as we make in a year, They sell cheese by the truckload, not by the pallet. How much more carbon footprint per pound does our cheese have moving around per pallet quantities as opposed to full truck?
Questions like that, those are the kinds of things that we’re kind of trying to wrap our heads around.
Ross Kenyon: I respect the hell out of the way that you’re approaching that. I think small farmers sometimes have an attitude of being so superior ecologically and otherwise for those reasons. And it’s funny to hear those questions pointed back at yourself too, where you’re like, wow, are we the baddies? As the famous sketch and joke goes. I think one way you could let yourself off the hook too is even if like per capita or per pound of cheese, you were higher, their volume is so much higher and their waste streams are also...
If you’re only looking at carbon, that’s one thing too, but what are they doing with all of that effluence that’s just like going into the waterways? And I’m sure yours is, your cycling is surely much cleaner, but I respect the way that you’re engaging in those questions.
Andy Hatch: Yeah, I don’t think small producers should get a free pass at all. Then there’s a third way that we’re looking at it, which really made me think more about what Nori is doing. We are working together with some other pasture-based dairy farms in Wisconsin. We’re in the early stages of looking at bundling our carbon credits as a group of farms that could then enter the market and Sell those carbon credits. Because our little 500 acre farm, I mean, yes, we don’t really sequester enough carbon to be attractive to an investment group, 500 acres.
But what if we went to the market with 50,000 acres of perennial pasture? Then maybe it becomes interesting to the players in the market. And I’m not on the leading edge. But the guy who is here in Wisconsin has just gotten some grant money together. And we have one of the first, there are maybe three or four of these prototype, they’re called pasture tracker. We drag it around our fields behind a four-wheeler in a beaming sonar. Down on the fields and essentially we’re spending all season tracking the amount of carbon being sequestered in the soil.
I won’t go into the math of how it does that, but it’s sort of early stages of us trying to quantify that with ultimately the goal of, I think, going to the carbon market with it and maybe also the goal of creating some kind of certification. These products are produced on a net zero farm. I’m not sure we are net zero. Trying to at least quantify it and see what it means in the market.
Ross Kenyon: That’s pretty interesting. I can imagine it’s challenging to... Soil is surprisingly complicated is the lesson here for everyone.
Andy Hatch: Yeah, and I don’t pretend to, my impression is the same as yours, that every time I kind of take a look around at the literature again, which I do maybe once or twice a year, it’s like, wow, they still don’t understand it. I think what the pasture tracker is doing, it’s measuring the pasture growth. And it’s using calculations that assume that there’s a proportionate a certain proportion of carbon being sequestered in the soil relative to what’s being grown above the soil. The two quantities are related. Is it going to be accurate?
I don’t know. Nori is... Primarily working with row crops and like big acreage, like in the Dakotas and that kind of thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think we’ve had plenty of conversations with different types of agricultural practitioners. Gosh, is that the most formal way to designate that group of people? Yeah. But yeah, even doing one thing well has been super hard in a long running challenge and introducing additional complexity to it has been something that we’ve waited on a little bit. But yeah, we are having lots of thoughts and thinking. I’m sure if you’re listening, we’ll do a show about Nori’s evolving thoughts on soil and carbon soon. My reticence to speak so directly on that is mostly because once I open it, I won’t be able to shut up for the next 50 minutes.
And I think we should probably be trying to conclude this before then, but we can definitely talk more. Are the prices of your inputs changing too? I think that’s a pretty conventional farmer gripe with climate and inflation and other macroeconomic factors.
Andy Hatch: Yes. I spent this morning going over... Last year’s numbers and trying to just climb inside the books and figure out what happened last year. And everything went up. Wages to employees, grain we feed the cows, propane, diesel. We shipped cheese around the country via FedEx. I came in. Monday morning, two days ago, January 2nd, flipped open the computer, started printing out FedEx labels, that went up another 7%. So, yeah, we feel squeezed. And, you know, maybe the natural response or one response is for us to turn around and raise our prices, which we’ve been reluctant to do.
We’ve done it in one or two cases. You know, cheese sold on our website went up this last year, but we’ve not yet raised the price of Pleasant Ridge. And that gets to be a complicated situation. But I think we’ll have to. We’re feeling the squeeze, I think, like everybody else.
Ross Kenyon: Do your corporate buyers, I guess the grocery stores in particular, do they have a lot of influence over how you’re changing prices? Are you locked into contracts with them?
Andy Hatch: I’m not. And somebody as small as we are, I think, doesn’t often get into that. Now, we sell to food service distributors. There’s some sizable companies. And we do have agreements. We have to give them 90 days notice, et cetera. But of course, they could refuse to buy it if they think it’s too expensive after a price increase. That’s really the leverage they have. Or buy less of it, of course.
Ross Kenyon: Is there any other way that you’ve been impacted or thinking? Oh, one other thing too that Liz brought up is the potential of different types of animals becoming more dominant in cheesemaking, especially hardier animals like goats. Do you see that as a viable possibility?
Andy Hatch: I have to give that some more thought. Wisconsin has the most of all three Types of dairy farms of any state in the country, goats, cows, and sheep. I mean, if her line of thinking is that goats and sheep are less resource intensive and maybe less susceptible to some climate issues, I think in theory that plays. I don’t see a lot of cow dairies in Wisconsin selling their cows and buying goats and sheep. I’m not sure that’s happening yet, but might be a little farther off.
Yeah. And, you know, Wisconsin is still a great place to milk cows. I mean, it hasn’t gotten any easier, certainly not as things are getting more expensive, but, you know, we’re, we have, the trend here is, you know, towards fewer and larger farms, like the trend everywhere. But it’s, there are still, you know, six, 7,000 family dairy farms in Wisconsin,
Ross Kenyon: Seems like the best way to avoid getting sucked into that is to avoid the commodity system where you can. Is that broadly accurate?
Andy Hatch: It seems the trend is either to go big, several thousand cows, and really try to take advantage of some economies of scale or do something specialized like we do, value-added. I think one trend I could speak to, and I don’t have statistics on it, but it’s been happening for several years now, is that Big dairies in California selling cows and moving to the Midwest simply because we have water.
Ross Kenyon: I guess that makes sense. I think Point Reyes is the only one I could name. Are there others? They haven’t moved, have they? They’d have to change the name.
Andy Hatch: No, no, no. And they have a long history, a beautiful farm there. Long may they run. But I can’t. There are a couple of families around here I could think of. Who came out in the last 10 years? California? Yeah. There just isn’t enough. I mean, my understanding, there just isn’t enough water there. We’ve got it here. But you look at the national cow numbers and cow herds are growing in places like Texas, New Mexico, places where there isn’t a lot of water anyway.
So I’m really not sure.
Ross Kenyon: Those have always struck me as goatish environments. That’s not an adjective, but I’m going to make it one. But like arid, kind of rocky.
Andy Hatch: And, you know, cows need a lot of water, 40, 50 gallons a day they’ll drink each. I just don’t see it and how they’re doing it in those arid climates. But.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s a lot of distortionary influences within agriculture too. I wonder if it’s an issue of subsidies or something else is happening or water is maybe priced for ag much cheaper than normal rates. Who can say on those things? But maybe it’ll eventually catch up and people will adapt, assuming they’re not misled by policy. I don’t know.
Andy Hatch: I can think of two other trends in that regard that are interesting. One is that land prices are going up and it’s becoming a more attractive asset for investors. I’ve read that’s particularly the case the last few years because the government showed, again, it’s willing to bail out farmers with subsidies. Trump in particular went big that election year. He dumped like $45 billion of subsidies into the farm economy. I think Bill Gates is now the largest landowner in the country. I think the investment class is looking at farmland and how much it’s appreciated and the fact that The renters who are farming that land but don’t own it are going to be bailed out by the government probably when times get tough.
So anyway, I think that increased investment has driven land values up. That’s worrisome for somebody in my position. The other interesting trend, and I think there’s going to be increased scrutiny over farming’s impact on water quality, climate as well, but You know, water quality and, um, I think, you know, perennial pasture, rotational grazing has a lot to offer on both of those fronts. But that discussion is getting pretty serious here in Wisconsin. Um, are there too many cows on too few acres? You know, what are the risks of doing that?
Ross Kenyon: You’re in the Dells, right? That’s like the hilly Southwestern portion. Is that right? The Driftless corner of the state. Oh, okay.
Andy Hatch: The Dells is an area about 40-50 miles from here, kind of south central part of the state. Nice. We’re in the hills, to the west of that.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. Is the water quality even bad as a consumer? Have you had problems either with your home drinking water or is it with the water that goes to the animals? Have you noticed anything or has it not reached that scale yet?
Andy Hatch: No, we have wonderful water here. I mean, we’re lucky. We’re limestone, really good drinking water. But there are some other parts of our state where they’ve started testing private wells and, you know, countywide testing three, 400 wells, and they’re finding more and more problems. And They’re at the stage now where they’re trying to trace it as the problem coming from cows. They’re finding more human contamination. Than everybody expected. Shoddy old septic systems, that kind of thing. So I think it’s early stages, but everybody’s saying that our county just ran a series of these tests.
And the numbers are, everybody turns their head and says, why are 20% of the wells above the legal limit for E. coli or nitrates? And so people are going to start demanding answers. And farmers, for the most part, we get a lot of slack in this country. But I think increasingly and appropriately, the public is going to demand that your private business can’t Threaten public resources. And I mean, that’s the same for industrial manufacturers, but it needs to be the same for farmers as well.
And I think that’s coming. But, you know, being a steward of natural resources and farmers aren’t out to pollute, of course, but I think we’ve so many of us have gotten free pass for so long. But I think, you know, as people get better information and farmers come under the spotlight, there are going to be some tough questions to answer. And so I think what that means for me and for any farmer is, you know, we’re going to have to work harder at showing the public how positive we can be when it comes to, yes, feeding people, but also like Stewards of natural resources and maybe carbon sinks and so on.
The risk is that all cows are going to be vilified. And you certainly are already seeing that in some of the plant-based media coverage, just throwing around reckless statistics. 20% of global carbon emissions comes from animal agriculture or Just made up numbers. But, you know, I wondered if you polled 14-year-old kids around the country now and said, are cows good for the environment or bad? I mean, I’m worried that we’re teaching people cows are bad. And that is not necessarily the case. So while I do see increased heat on farms, animal farms for how they...
Impact the environment. I think we got to be careful to not treat all farms the same. And those people doing positive things need to get that out there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, Andy, as we start wrapping up here, where can people enjoy your cheese? It’s your chance to send hopeful future customers to your door. Cue the sales pitch. Yeah.
Andy Hatch: Your listeners, I’m sure, are Far-flung. So the simplest one-line answer is to buy right from us on our website, uplandscheese.com. We send it all over the country right to your house, right from our farm. But if you’re in a city and near an independent cheese shop, that is the best place to buy cheese. And you’ll find our cheese. We’re a Not a big producer. We’re not in every store in the country, but we are in the best cheese shops in the cities from coast to coast.
And if you don’t have an independent cheese shop, but you have access to a grocery store, we’re in a lot of Whole Foods all over the country. For Seattle, you’ve got some local chains of PCC and places like that. So you can find us. We’re out there. And you can always... Send me a line at uplandscheese.com. Go to our website, ask us where to find our cheese. We’re pretty easy to talk to. I’m on there right now and I see that there’s an extra aged Pleasant Ridge Reserve that exists, which I will soon be ordering myself.
Yeah, we’d love to send you some.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that sounds great. Well, thanks for being here with us, Andy. Thanks for answering so many questions about cheese in general and your operations and climate change. Of course, I enjoy it, Ross. Nice to talk to somebody interesting and smart from across the country. Yeah, talking cheese. Yeah, thank you again. And thanks for listening too. Thanks for being a part of the show. Please give us a great rating and review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening. Share this with a friend.
Go eat some cheese. Go buy some Pleasant Ridge Reserve. And thanks so much for listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
