Our First Farmer: Julaine
Julaine is the first farmer we found when we started searching for regeneratively farmed food. She and her husband Johannes are the dairy farmers behind Creekside Cheese and Creamery. It’s incredible what they’ve been able to do in just five years of taking a new/old approach to farming and cheesemaking.
“Most dairy farmers milk their cows, then ship the milk off to be processed elsewhere,” says Johannes. “About a hundred years ago, it used to be that dairy farmers would do the milking, the cheesemaking, and the selling. Now for the first time since my great-grandparents, we’re doing all those steps again.” Creekside Dairy milks, pasteurizes, bottles, sells only their own organic milk and handmade cheese.
But why switch from conventional to the hard work of doing it all yourself?
Firstly, their Swiss Brown cows are producing A2 milk, and Julaine wants to sell it separate from A1 conventional milk. A2 is a different type of protein chain than A1, and some people find that they can digest it much easier. Since starting The Honest Farmer, we’ve found customers and their kids who can only digest A2 milk, and found us by Googling “Where can I buy A2 milk?”
Secondly, the cows are fed a healthy diet of only grass, wildflowers, and forbs in the form of pasture-grazing, hay, and sileage – all year long. Their diet is supplemented with peas and barley in the winter, but never corn. With the combination of sunshine and a diet that is natural to a cow’s gut, the result is creamier, more delicious, and more vitamin-packed milk and cheese. Although we don’t have the tests to prove it, the lifestyle and diet of Julaine and Johannes’ cows result in more nourishing, healthy dairy for you to eat. Plus it’s more humane to the cows' stomachs to feed them a natural diet.
Third, the whole milk is gently pasteurized to kill any germs, but then it is NOT homogenized like conventional milk. Homogenization is when high pressure is applied to milk to break up the fat globules into smaller bits so the cream doesn’t rise to the top. With non-homogenized milk, you need to give that bottle a quick shake to distribute the creamy top into the rest of the milk (like the good old days). People who are sensitive to milk have reported that they can digest non-homogenized milk easier than when it’s homogenized.
And fourth, the glass bottles. It's easier on the planet in a waste-filled society to use and reuse glass bottles. Julaine and her kids hand-fill our sterilized 2L and 1L glass bottles again and again (so please return them) because we care about our impact on the planet. Concerns have been raised about chemicals leaching into our food from plastic packaging. We know fairly little about that, but using glass is a safe option for cleanliness and keeping the milk safe to drink.
During the time we've spent with Julaine and Johannes, getting to know their practices, we've heard more about the differences in organic dairy farming and cheesemaking. In future blogs we'll share more about the art/science of cheesemaking, cow socialisation, and why we make choices that are hard work but better for our bodies and the environment.
