Organic Greens and Blue Cheese Farm Tour
On August 10, 2011, CUESA toured Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company and County Line Harvest. Photos by Barry Jan.
We started our tour at Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co., owned by the Giacomini family. The 700-acre ranch sits along Highway 1, just north of Point Reyes Station.
These are our hosts, Bob Giacomini and his daughter Jill. Bob has been ranching on the same property for 52 years. By the late 1990s he had a herd of 500 cows, but selling milk was proving less than profitable. In 2000, he, his wife Dean, and their four daughters decided to downsize the herd and focus on cheese.
The family hosted us at their new culinary center, The Fork.
We got to see their creamery through a window (strict sanitary rules don't allow non-employees in).
Pt. Reyes Farmstead Cheese makes around 700,000 pounds of blue cheese a year. (To give us a sense of scale, Jill told us that most commercial companies make around a million pounds in a day!) They also make small quantities of Toma (a mild white cheese), fresh mozzarella, and a soon-to-be-named aged blue cheese they're calling "new blue."
The bulk of the cheese is sold to distributors who then sell it to restaurants and retailers around the country. Most of the wedges (like those pictured here) get sold at farmers markets around the Bay Area. Jill says they love farmers markets because it's the only way they can hear feedback from their end users. "It's like one big focus group," says Jill.
Bob took the group into the milking parlor. The herd is milked at 2 pm and 2 am every day. Each Holstein cow gives around 4.5 gallons of milk per milking. Some of that milk goes to feed the calves, and the rest is made into cheese--except one day each week, when the company takes a break from cheese making and sells the milk to Clover Stornetta.
The cows give a good quantity of milk for around five years, on average. Cows are pregnant most of the time, so they'll bear calves and continue giving milk. Cows gestate for around 9 months; they get a break from milking for 60 days before giving birth.
The cows graze on pasture for part of the year. Like most dairy cows, the Giacominis' herd also eats a lot of agricultural byproducts. In the grain barn, we saw piles of canola pellets (pictured), cotton seeds, soy hulls (from oil production), and dried distillers' grains (from ethanol production).
The farm recycles all its water. This holding pond is where the water goes after it is flushed through the "lanes" to clean the barn. It then goes to irrigate the fields to keep the grass on the ranch both hydrated and fertilized.
The farm uses the gas produced from their methane digester to run this generator. The digester is a covered pond where a combination of cow manure and whey left over from the cheese making process are broken down into methane. This process creates enough energy to power both the dairy and the creamery (but not the Fork, or the houses on the property).
The white tubes pictured are the farm's new storage system for silage. Silage is pasture grass that gets mowed during the rainy season, quickly fermented, and then stored so that it can provide fresh food for the cows during the warm, dry season when the pasture provides very little nutrition. The white hutches in the foreground are where the young calves are kept.
The highlight of the tour was the baby cows. Some were as young as one day old.
Next we visited County Line Harvest in Marin. The farm also has a second location in southern California's Coachella Valley.
Farmer David Retsky wasn't available, but we were met by his assistant Tiffany Glover, and Kitty Dolcini (pictured in bright blue), who owns the property. A few years back Kitty sold her land development rights to MALT (Marin Agricultural Land Trust) in an agreement called an easement; this allowed her to buy the inherited land from her siblings and will ensure that all 600 acres will remain in agriculture in perpetuity.
Kitty raises around 350 hens on pasture, but has to protect them in houses like this mobile home at night when the raccoons and coyotes some down from the hills. Locals stop by the farm to buy the eggs on the honor system, and Kitty was talking about setting up a farm stand that also offers produce.
The farm has about 40,000 Seascape strawberry plants. As their name suggests, Seascapes are a variety that does well in a cool, coastal climate.
Lettuces comprise around 50% of County Line's total sales. The farm's salad mix is made up of a variety of lettuces (like the red Lolla Rosa); they are trimmed by hand (with scissors). Each bed yields two or three harvests before it is turned into the soil.
Little Gems are also a chef favorite.
Tiffany told us about the floating row covers the farm uses to keep beetles away from their Brassica vegetables. This thin fabric allows water and breeze in, but protects the plants in their vulnerable early weeks. And it's reusable! Some of these covers have been in use for nearly a decade, said Tiffany.
Just beyond the ridge is a 40-acre reservoir that provides ample water to the farm through an underground pipe. There are bass in the reservoir, and Tiffany told us that she'd caught a few to eat.
This is a row of turnips that were a little too old to sell at the market. Tiffany let us pick a few to take home; the rest will go to schools in Marin through Marin Organic's gleaning program.
Tiffany and several of the other farm employees live in yurts like this one. In this photo you can also see a few of the two-year-old apple and persimmon trees they've planted on the farm.
The tour highlight: strawberry picking!
Thanks, Tiffany, for rearranging your schedule to give us such a great tour!
