VALUE - ADDED CORNER
Iowa cheese co-op helps
preserve a way of life
Copyright 2004, Des Moines Register
ike the blue cheese it
produces, the Golden
Ridge Cheese Cooperative
had to age a while
before it was ready to go.
Founded five years ago by 40 Old
Order Amish dairy farmers in northern
Iowa and southern Minnesota, Golden
Ridge was plagued by a series of production
problems before the first blue
cheese wheels were shipped from its
12,500-square-foot plant north of
Cresco, Iowa, last January.
The Amish farmers invested more
of their own capital into the plant, for
a total of $1 million, and brought in
Neville McNaughton, a New Zealand
native and cheese consultant who
now lives in St. Louis. Like the blue
mold that turns the Amish milk into
cheese, McNaughton’s addition as
general manager has turned the
Golden Ridge co-op into a going
operation.
The co-op got a big boost in July
when its Schwarz und Weiss natural
rind blue cheese tied for first place in
the blue cheese category of the
American Cheese Society’s annual
contest held in Milwaukee.
The competition is “considered
one of the world’s most influential
and prestigious competitions in recognizing
the art of specialty cheesemaking,”
according to the American
Cheese Society’s Web site. Since
the announcement of the award,
McNaughton said, “Cheese is now
flying out of here. People are calling
us.” Prospects at the co-op weren’t so
rosy when McNaughton first showed
up at the Golden Ridge plant.
“This was a stalled project,” he said.
“They couldn’t decide how to get this
up and running.”
McNaughton did a three-day assessment
of the operation and re-wrote the
co-op’s business plan. The co-op had
been focused on making what
McNaughton called commodity blue
cheese. “We refocused the plant on
making a quality product that plays to
the strength of the milk,” he said.
A $2 million loan guarantee was
obtained from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture’s rural development agency
[USDA Rural Development]. That
loan guarantee allowed the co-op’s
bank to advance it more money to
reconfigure the plant.
Dan Gingerich, an Old Order
Amish dairy producer from
Lanesboro, Minn., said the co-op
members “didn’t realize what we were
getting into” when they decided to
form the co-op and make cheese. The
dairy producers milk their small herds
by hand and sell the milk in stainless
steel cans weighing 80 pounds that
hold just under 10 gallons of milk.
The number of dairy processors willing
to handle their milk cans had
dropped from five to one, Gingerich
said, narrowing their marketing
options considerably.
“I’m trying to hang on to the dairy,”
he said. “It got tougher to make a living
on the farm than 20 years ago.”
Forming a cooperative to produce
cheese in a modern plant needed to be
examined by leaders of the Old Order
Amish, Gingerich said. For religious
reasons, Old Order Amish do not use
many kinds of modern machinery.
Their lifestyle is best known for the
horse-and-buggy transportation on
which the Amish rely.” Our elders
thought that in order to keep the family
farms going, we needed to change,”
Gingerich said.
“We needed something like this so
our children won’t have to live on one
or two acres and become factory workers.
On the one hand, it might be a
modern concept, but on the other
hand, we needed to have something
like the cheese plant to keep our way
of life going.”
With McNaughton on board and
the American Cheese Society award,
Gingerich said he thinks Golden Ridge
has turned the corner. Golden Ridge
makes three cheese products: Schwarz
und Weiss, which means “black and
white” in German; Harmony Blue,
which has extra cream added, and
Ultimate 50, which is half Amish cow
milk and half goat milk supplied by Joy
Peckham, whose Peckview Dairy
Goats operation is near the plant.
Peckham sells the Golden Ridge
cheese and her other dairy goat products
at the Metro Market in Des
Moines and the Des Moines Farmers
Market.
“Last weekend, I sold everything I
brought in from Golden Ridge in the
first hour,” Peckham said. “I wish I had
brought more.” Peckham said she
hopes the Ultimate 50 cheese takes off
so she can eventually sell to Golden
Ridge all of the 500,000 pounds of
goat milk produced annually by her
goats. Now, she sells almost all of her
goat milk to a plant in Illinois.
Steve Logsdon, owner of the Basil
Prosperi Bakery in Des Moines, said
Schwarz und Weiss is selling well out
of his dairy case.
“We carry European blue cheeses
and Australian blue cheeses, and we’ve
had a really good response to the
Golden Ridge cheese,” Logsdon said.
“People like the fact that it’s from Iowa
and that they are using their own
milk.” The Golden Ridge cheese also
is priced competitively, he said, with a
half-pound selling for $7 to $8, about
the same as the nationally known
Maytag blue cheese, the only other
blue cheese made in Iowa.
Swiss Valley Farms, a farmer-owned
cooperative with operations in Iowa,
makes blue cheese at its plant in
Mindoro, Wis. Myrna Ver Ploeg, president
of Maytag Dairy Farms, said she
did not think the Golden Ridge and
Maytag blue cheeses can be compared.
“Ours is so different because it is made
by hand,” Ver Ploeg said. “They are
very different cheeses, and they satisfy
different markets.”
The Maytag Dairy Farm, which was
founded by Maytag appliance family
members in 1941, no longer is connected
with the company. The dairy is
privately owned by 12 Maytag family
members. The dairy does not release
its sales numbers, Ver Ploeg said, but it
makes 1 million pounds of blue cheese
a year and buys 27,000 gallons of milk
a day from small dairy farms within 15
miles of Newton. The Maytag dairy is
expanding its aging calves to allow
production to increase, Ver Ploeg said.
“We don’t make enough cheese to
meet the demand,” she said. “We don’t
want to be a big cheese company. We
just want to be a good one.”
Gingerich, chairman of Golden
Ridge, said the same thing about the
Amish co-op.“We want to keep it
small,” he said.
McNaughton said Golden Ridge
now buys about 20,000 pounds of milk
a day from its Amish producers. But
only about 5,000 pounds of the milk
bought by Golden Ridge is processed
into cheese, McNaughton said. The
rest is sold to AMPI, a large regional
dairy processor [and also a farmerowned
cooperative]. The co-op’s goal,
Gingerich said, is to make all the
Amish milk into cheese.
Editor’s note: this article is reprinted
courtesy the Des Moines Register. In addition
to the $2 million USDA Business and
Industry (B&I) Guaranteed loan mentioned
above, Golden Ridge Cheese
Cooperative also received a $500,000
Value Added Producer Grant (VAPG)
from USDA Rural Development. To learn
more about both programs, visit: www.rurdev.
usda.gov, and follow the links for business
programs. Or call (202) 720-4323,
and press “1” to be connected to your
USDA Rural Development state office.
