Organic Food 101

Lesson 2: Getting to Know Your Organic Farmer

Doe's Leap: Organic Goat Cheese

When Kristan Doolan and George van Vlaanderen, of East Fairfield, Vermont, decided to get their Doe's Leap goat dairy farm and farmstead cheese plant certified organic, their decision was based more on their philosophical beliefs than on economics.

"It wasn't because of price because for a farmstead produced cheese I think there's a ceiling for the amount you can get," Kristan says. "People are paying about $16 per pound and I don't think they will pay more."

The couple was particularly concerned about feeding genetically modified corn and soy to their goats.

"I don't like that direction in agriculture in general," Kristan says. "There is also the philosophy of organic health care where you should be able to raise these animals at a level of health without a lot of pharmaceuticals. We've been able to manage without drugs but that is easier to say with a small herd. Perhaps problems will crop up as we get larger."

Being certified organic may not have allowed Doe's Leap to charge more for its cheese. It has, however, made it a little easier. A lot of people looking for a high quality farmstead cheese appreciate the added value of the organic certification. The certification also created a wholesale market for the farm's feda.

"For the last year we have been shipping about a third of our production to an organic processor in California," Kristan says. "They had lost their other supplier and tracked us down somehow. They need all organic ingredients in their product and there aren't many other organic goat dairies."

Since Kristan has young children at home she particularly appreciates the opportunity to ship significant amounts of cheese from home rather than having to always drive to her other markets at restaurants or farmer's markets.

Becoming certified organic for Doe's Leap was both easy and difficult. Since the farm land they purchased had been out of production for many years the usual requirement to farm it organically for three years before obtaining certification was waived. Keeping their non-organic goats out of production for the required transition period was not a problem either.

"The organic standard when we bought our animals was that they had to be transitioned onto organic feed for ninety days before they could be considered organic," Kristan says. "That was fine for us because we had our animals here before we were licensed to sell cheese. But now, under the new national organic program, the transition period is one year."

Organic certification does not allow chemical parasite control and it requires feeding the goats all certified organic feed. Finding certified organic grains has not been too challenging because there are a growing number of organic cow dairies in the northeast. Certified organic hay has been another problem.

"The biggest problem has been finding high quality certified organic hay. There are a lot of people producing hay around here but very few are certified organic," Kristan says. "They may not be using anything other than manure on their hay ground but if they're not certified it won't work for us."

When the goats aren't eating hay or the grain that Kristan feeds them, they graze pasture. Goats prefer brush browse to grass so Kristan tried something new. The farm had a lot of brushy areas so Kristan turned the goats out into that. But first she and George, who teaches school while Kristan manages the goats and makes the cheese, created small paddocks in the brush. She thought if the goats only stayed in one small paddock for a few days, and then were moved to a new one, they wouldn't get parasites from their own manure. If it worked she wouldn't have to use drugs to kill the parasites, like other farmers do and, without parasites, her goats would produce more milk. Kristan got a small grant from the United States Department of Agriculture to try her experiment and compare the results to goats grazing grass.

"There was a really clear increase in milk production for the goats on brushy browse the first year," Kristan says.

The second year Kristan learned how to manage goats on grass better and they got fewer parasites. She rotated the grass goats quickly through their paddocks too. Now the grass goats and the brush goats both are healthier and produce lots of milk.

Kristan found getting Doe's Leap cheese plant certified was somewhat easier. "In your cheese plant you can buy your standard cultures and rennet because they're used in such low quantities in the final product. I think you can have a total of five percent of your ingredients be non-organic and still call your cheese organic. We had a difficult time finding a salt to use. We're small enough so that we buy salt in four pound boxes and a lot of salts have an anti-caking agent in them that is a cyanide derivative. There's zero tolerance for that," says Kristan, who makes tomme, chevre, caprella, and feda cheeses from her Nubian goat's milk.

When the national organic standards went into effect in October, 2002 there were other aspects of certification that had zero tolerance.

"The big change with the new national standards is that there's zero tolerance for antibiotics. Before you could give an animal antibiotics and wait a year and put her back in the organic milking line. Now if you ever give an animal antibiotics you have to remove her from the farm. You can bring in uncertified animals and wait a year and transition them into your farm but you can't do that with your own animal that you treat. It's a little extreme--particularly for a small farm-- but it's designed for larger farms and to close loop holes that they might use to get around the rules," Kristan says. "I did have a kid I treated for cocidiosis. She probably would have died if I hadn't but I had to get rid of her. It's unfortunate big business is getting into organics."

All certified organic farms are inspected and certified by a third party inspection agency. Doe's Leap's certifier is the Northeastern Organic Farmers Association of Vermont.

  1  2  3  4