GOOD OLE’ WISCONSIN CHEESE FACTORIES

I was just over admiring my Wisconsin Badger friend Melissa’s post today on Fresh Starts, Fresh Curds, where she talks about her Wisconsin community’s Annual Cheese Fest on Saturday. If you haven’t stopped by her site yet today, please do so, and before you leave, you’ll have developed a tarnation hunger for fresh cheese curds that won’t quit.

As she talked about the cheese factories located near to her home, it got me to thinking about my youth years in south central Wisconsin, and what an important part the small, local cheese factories played (and still plays today, to some degree) in rural Wisconsin.

My earliest recollection of small, rural cheese factories in Wisconsin when I was growing up, starts in about 1948 or ‘50, when I remember visiting different relatives and family friends who were dairy farmers, primarily small dairy farmers, in the famed “Driftless Area” (unglaciated hill country) of south central and western Wisconsin, where it seemed there was a small neighborhood milk/cheese factory every few miles or so all throughout the area.

Late in the 19th century and early in the 20th century in Wisconsin, dairy farmers milked their cows by hand, and stored the fresh milk in large tin-plated cans, which were kept inside the farm milk house, which normally had a spring-fed,concrete cistern-like structure, full of the cold spring water flowing through it, to keep the milk cool in the cans until it could be hauled to a nearby factory.

This was well before the time of modern electricity-powered, vacuum machine milking machines. Back then, the milking was all done by hand, twice a day, 365 days a year, good weather and bad.

Because the milk can hauling was by horse and wagon in those early days, the milk markets (the milk and cheese factories) by necessity, had to be fairly nearby, which gave rise to milk and cheese factories being established every few miles in dairy farm country. Melissa’s post talks about just such nearby factories.

With the advent of motorized vehicles and machinery, many farmers started using tractors and trucks to do the daily hauling of the cooled milk cans to the factory. Later on in the 20th century, milk trucking companies came into being, either privately or company-owned, which basically relieved the Wisconsin dairy farmer, for a price, of having to haul his own milk to the market.

Milking by hand eventually gave way to the milking machine systems, which have continued to evolve into the high-tech milking systems seen today in dairy farms.

The dairy farmers of the 1950 era, received mostly money for their milk, but could also receive the byproducts of their milk as partial payment for their canned milk brought to the factory. These by products often included wrapped and rolled butter, cottage cheese, butter milk, ice cream, various cheeses and cheese curd.

One of my fondest memories during the dairy farm visits of those days, was accompanying the farmer friend/relative to the milk plant/cheese factory when he took his cans to market. All the way home, I would be able to sample some of the by-products the farmer had picked up while at the milk plant to take back home.

Being raised in a very rural area of south central Wisconsin, although I was not part of an immediate farm family, I had school many classmates and friends who did live on dairy farms, and I was privileged to be able to spend lots of days on those farms playing with my friends, especially up in the hay mows, jumping off into the piled hay and bales from some high place in the mow. At that age, I sure didn’t realize how really dangerous that was.

Every so often, I would have the experience of visiting a nearby cheese factory, and watch the workers process the raw milk into curd and the various cheeses. It was the best of all worlds when we could reach down into the huge cheese making troughs and scoop out a hand full of fresh curds! Hmmmm! Nothing better!

I’ll tell you, though, there is hardly another occupation where the work is any harder than that of a cheese maker. That is hard, hard work, folks. Even very strong backs eventually fail due to the regimen required daily in the making of cheese at those small factories.

Today, a number of the small factories have established sales rooms right at the factory, where retail customers may stop in and purchase a large variety of cheeses and associated products, many which are made and aged right on the premises. Those same factory sales rooms can usually shipped their products throughout the country, via UPS, FedEx and the mail.

In our Wisconsin home, there is always some cheese either in the fridge or freezer (yes, you can safely freeze it), and it is a rare meal that does not have some type of cheese on the table at mealtime. And in case you are wondering, NO, I am not getting paid by the cheese companies, nor do I have anyone related anymore, in the cheese-making business. We just LOVE CHEESE!

Two of those smaller premier cheese factories I like to shop at when I am home include: Carr Valley Cheese, in LaValle, WI, and Hook’s Cheese Company, in Mineral point, WI. They have excellent cheeses, and they ship to your state!

Cheese making today, whether it be a small, rural cheese factory, or one of the large corporate operations, is a tough business, where profit margins are razer thin, and to make it and stay in business for tomorrow, a close watch must be had on total operations.

To most farming communities, it is a sad day when a small, historical cheese factory closes its doors for the final time and fades into history.

So, GET OUT THERE, CHEESE LOVERS, AND HELP KEEP THOSE FOLKS IN THE BUSINESS OF PROVIDING YOU WITH TOP QUALITY, YUMMY DELICIOUS WISCONSIN CHEESE! GO PACKERS!!!

(And NO, all of us do not wear those cheese heads; are you kidding…!???

2 gazillion mice can’t all be wrong! CHEESE ROCKS!