The Farm. My Cheesemaking Travels, Jasper Hill 2014. The Vermont Diaries 3/3
I love the farm. It feels so good to finally be working outside and great to have contact with the cows. They are the heart of this whole operation. Something real and simple that sits at the centre of this hoo-ha of cheese making. There are 45 lovely beasts with temperaments as varied as their names. Moo is languid and lazy, always last to amble slowly out of the barn and into the field. Jasmine is a feisty, difficult cow who works hard to fight me off as I try to hold her still and feed her glucose. Delphi spends the week noisily voicing her upset at being left in the barn because of her bad feet and Greensboro is gentle and placid and allows me to inject her vaccine booster with a minimum of fuss.
My wish to have contact with the cows is promptly granted as I get kicked on my first day. Phoebe genuinely can’t understand how I manage this in under an hour but I actually feel proud of the incident. Surely now no one can say I haven’t got any proper farming experience? Getting kicked feels like a misplaced badge of honour somehow and I get a wonderful hoof shaped bruise that lasts until I’m back in Scotland.
It is great to finally be in the fresh air with proper muddy wellies on. I have spent the whole of my summer in wellingtons. In the cellars they were covered in mould and in the cheese house they were full of whey so it feels good to have them back on the ground where they belong. The only downside to all this practical outdoor work is that I destroy two pairs of jeans and seriously wreck another in three days. Split seams plus iodine and chainsaw oil mean they are mostly beyond rescue. The upside to this is that their absence from my suitcase means I have more room to smuggle cheese home. I get a real insight into why farmers look the way they do. It is so hard to stay clean and keep clothing intact. Your body also undergoes it’s own challenges as a pervasive smell moves in and decides to settle on me for the week. I don’t dislike it but find it’s persistence a little perturbing. Blowing your nose also becomes an intriguing activity – the contents are black. I agree this is disgusting but honestly get quite curious about how it is happening. The mystery remains unsolved.
The farm team are wonderfully laid back. I feel a massive sense of relief as I realise that there will be few reprimands here if any. Tension slides off of me as that knowledge slowly sinks in. I have to confess that I am thoroughly sick of being told what to do and feel deeply grateful that my last week is bucking this trend. No one seems able to comprehend that being an intern does not mean you are at a loose end and for some reason cannot get a paid job. A summer of being asked what I would like to do with my life has left me touchy and irritable as well as daunted at how quickly and easily it is possible to lose your status in the world. I get over this but it feels like an important lesson I must try not to forget.
My work on the farm includes:
Feeding the cows. They get grain and hay while in the barn for milking and each cow gets a different amount of grain depending on a coloured tag in their ear so I spent a lot of time peering through the dark at ear tags.
Milking the cows. This is quite honestly terrifying. It is a low and dark barn and you are crouched in the muck by their back legs desperately scrubbing away at their udders to make sure they are clean. They understandably do not like a stranger doing this and my clumsiness clearly gives me away. Some are patient, others less so. I am proud of managing to take part though and it feels great to be working away as the sun rises and golden light streams into the barn.
Letting the cows in and out of the barn. This is trickier then you would think as they have a tie stall system and awkward chain hooks that have to be undone and done up quickly. I get better at this as time goes by but never like handling Bluebell as she’s huge and seems to enjoy making the task difficult by thrashing her head around.
Cleaning the barn. Which I like doing though clearing the sludge gutters is as bad as it sounds and seems to take forever.
Setting up new paddocks. The cows move every day so this is a job that constantly needs organising and thinking about. It means striding across fields of tall grasses in the sunshine so I love it. Another bonus of this task was using the four wheeler to get between the barn and pasture. This is great fun though I must admit to a slight misadventure on my first drive alone. I head off to let the cows out and reach a slope which has an electric fence set up across it as a gate. The four wheeler (or quad bike as we would call it at home) unfortunately has no proper breaks so as I endeavour to quickly hop off, unhook the fence and hop on again it begins to roll after me. I try and fail to hold it back so it rolls over my feet and collides with the gate. There are a few seconds of panic as I desperately try to unhook the wire which is live and now conducting its not inconsiderable current through me and the four wheeler. It is a hilarious Jacque Tati-esque moment and as the wire finally snaps under the tension I decide that the best policy is for me to drive off as if nothing has happened forgetting that I’ve been in full view of the cheese house and barn the entire time.
Sorting the hay barn. This is a nightmarish task. They store the hay in a huge roof space above the barn and it is amazing to look at but hot, dark and treacherous to work in. It is a real challenge to stack the bales properly so as you heave them across to wherever they have to go you lurch in a drunken sailor like fashion from one near fall to another. It’s a miracle I didn’t break or at least sprain an ankle. A fellow farmhand slips through a hole up to his neck at one point and is still metres from the floor. It is exhausting work and you emerge dehydrated and sweating with hay sticking to every bit of your body it can get to, desperately longing for a shower.
Building a new pig paddock. I like this job because it’s in the woods and near the pigs. I get very fond of the pigs. I’m not sure it’s possible to watch them thrashing around in a homemade bath of whey, spraying it everywhere with unconcealed delight and not fall a little in love.
Feeding the pigs. This is such a disgusting job that you have to just enter into the spirit of things and try and enjoy it. Because they are fed on whey and old cheeses everything smells of fermenting, rotted cheese. There are huge reeking patches of frothing, pungent, moulding muddy ground. Walking through this to manhandle large awkward tubes covered in fermented curds to pipe fresh whey into their feeding troughs is quite an experience. It is like coming full circle and feels like an apt conclusion. From lovingly cherishing, moulding, brushing, salting, spiking and turning the wonderful Bayley Hazen I go to hacking it up with a shovel in a festering, stinking crate and throwing it to the pigs who devour it in a frenzy of tails and trotters.
So here I am, the Cheesemaking-Farmer-Affineur intern of 2014, signing off. It has been an amazing summer. Thank you for being there and for giving me a reason to put pen to paper and write some of it down.
Over and out.
Emma
Aspiring Farmer
The Barn
Jasper Hill
VT, USA
