How we chow part 2: Handled with Care
5/02/2008
By: Tom Laskin, Isthmus
George Crave and his brothers Charles, Mark and Thomas didn't get much support either when they built a 6,000-square-foot cheese factory on their Waterloo dairy farm in 2001. But that was no surprise. Like Uplands' Gingrich, the Crave brothers were pioneers of on-farm processing. "We were out in front of this movement," George Crave says, inside his office at the bustling plant. "The state and the university were very skeptical of a [dairy] producer getting into manufacturing."
Despite the skepticism from experts and government funders, George Crave says the early development of Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese (www.cravecheese.com) was "very exciting and rewarding for the whole family." Between them, the brothers had put together a large dairy operation, and cheese making was a logical way to expand the family business and provide the public with a healthy products. At the same time, they were giving the next generation of Craves a stake in the evolving dairy industry.
Unlike Uplands' Gingrich, George Crave already had some insight into the realities of dairy marketing, thanks to the years his wife, Debbie, a former Alice in Dairyland, had spent at both the state agriculture department and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board. Consequently, he wasn't shy about picking the brains of major cheese marketers, who suggested that the Craves concentrate on fresh mozzarella (then something of a rarity in Wisconsin and elsewhere), mascarpone and a rope-style cheese.
It was a good suggestion. In 2002, just months after making their first cheese, the Craves won second place from the American Cheese Society for their fresh mozzarella.
By the standards of big commodity cheese makers, Crave Brothers Farmstead Cheese is still a small company. But with a couple dozen employees turning out 10,000 hand-packed containers of cheese every workday (or up to 50,000 pounds a week), it's much bigger than Uplands.
You don't sell that volume of production at farmers' markets or to a strictly local customer base, and the Craves never intended to be a tiny artisanal farm. Thanks to contracts with cheese distributors, semis regularly pull up to the plant's loading dock to transport 80% of Crave Brothers' cheese out of state.
But even though the Craves represent the upper end of farm-based processing, they remain very responsible producers. All the growth-hormone-free milk used in their cheese is still pumped fresh each day from their dairy barns, across the road from the cheese factory. All the electricity used in the plant is generated by a methane digester that uses manure from their 600-plus cows. Currently, the whey left over from cheese making is recycled through the farm as fertilizer and feed, but after a plant expansion is finished, much of it will be turned into dry whey protein, a food product that's in demand around the world.
"It's a very sustainable model," says George Crave. "We were doing it before it was fashionable."
Sustainable, green, natural. Whatever you call it, the Crave brothers' approach to cheese making syncs up directly with the concerns of consumers who want to pull away from the country's industrialized food system.
The Craves haven't forgotten about the gourmets, either. Les Frères, a boutique, European-style farm cheese that's aged in a man-made cave beneath the factory, is a favorite of discerning outlets like Murray's. Creamy in texture, complex in flavor, and just strong enough to pair well with bread, fruit and wine, it, too, has won national awards.
Although the factory makes just 400 pounds of Les Frères each week, it's an important part of the company's farmstead profile. "We kind of joke that we don't get invited to the Radisson in Chicago to speak about our string cheese," George Crave smiles.
