Eat Cheese, Save a Wetland

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 40

Eat Cheese, Save a Wetland

The Register's article on the closing of the university dairy at Iowa State made Ruthann Garcia shake her head. Funding cuts. Research cuts. Layoffs. Change, always change. Where's the bright side, she wondered as she read the newsprint headline again, "ISU defends ag budget cuts."

Just yesterday Laura had stopped for coffee. This is the last of it, she said. The last of the real Nauvoo bleu. They're going to make it somewhere else now. Sold to Beatrice. Beatrice sold to ConAgra. ConAgra sells to Saputo in Canada. Saputo shuts it down. Moves the "brand."

Laura laid half a small wheel of Nauvoo Blue Cheese on the counter. With no small amount of disgust in her voice she said that someone had stripped the machinery. Sold it elsewhere. The plant is empty. Sixty-five jobs gone from a town of 1,063. That's quite a few jobs gone from Hancock County with just 20,121. And dairy farmers with markets now further away. Nauvoo Blue Cheese will now be made who knows where. It must be like a death in the family Laura concluded.

Is it any wonder people want to know where their food comes from? Ruthann pondered.

What if some small organic startup got all that equipment? Ruthann asked. Laura thought that would be better, but why not let a local group of investors have a crack at it before they just sold the plant and the jobs off like they meant nothing? Good point.

She recalled from her days at ISU that Oscar Rohde had figured out how to culture bleu from cow's milk in the Ames dairy labs, rather than from the traditional French recipe goat's milk. Rohde went to Nauvoo in 1927 to promote his cheese for aging in the many wine cellars built there by the French Icarians who, in 1849, immigrated to fill the vacuum left by the gone-west Mormons.

Ruthann took another sip of coffee. She began to think hard about all this.

She thought about bleu cheese. How tangy it tasted. How some people loved it; how others hated it. Ruthann thought about dairy economic policy seemingly shifted toward populous regions with more congressional clout. How people worried about fat in their diets and bought less dairy. Then, with no subsidy payments for hay and pasture, is it any wonder small and medium-sized dairies are disappearing? That little traditional creameries and cheese plants are vanishing?

Where's the bright side? Ruthann put down the paper and looked out at the corn and beans on her own farm, hillier than most around here. All the land she and Rick could afford.

Any wonder that corn and beans on the high ground have the topsoil filling in impoundments and catch basins and terraces, and worse, destroying the few remaining native wetlands in the upper Midwest, the very few? Hay and forage for cows, goats, and sheep -- for ruminants of all kinds -- cause far less erosion, lose fewer nutrients, generate few contaminants.

Sure, "grassland reserve" is starting up in Wisconsin, but it's too late for the dairy farmers and cheesemakers downriver in Hancock County, Illinois.

Or is it? Where's the big money trail in agriculture these day? Hmm. In high-tech genetically modified organisms, in agrichemicals, in executive salaries, in short term profits instead of long term sustainable growth that doesn't mine topsoil and destroy communities. That's where.

Then, where's the heart of the people, where's their joy in farming nowdays, she wondered? Well, let's see, in family, church, school, community, friendships, sure, all those things. But in agriculture itself, it's in finding the good and true things like heirloom seeds and traditional blood lines, and in the wholesomeness of sweet, organic soils, and in small artisan food operations, and community supported agriculture, in farmers markets, in the rediscovery of local food economies. It's in making a decent, even a prosperous living farming without destroying the land, Without poisoning your family and the creatures you share the earth with.

Ruthann thought about all this. How can I sum it up, get people to understand?

Hmm.

Next...Chapter 41.

Thanks for these resources:

"The Milky Way: Are we losing touch with good, simple things?" by Donella Meadows, 30 Jan 2001.

James A. Riddle
Policy Specialist
Organic Independents
Rt. 3 Box 162C
Winona, MN 55987
Ph/fax: 507-454-8310
Email: jriddle@hbci.com

Common Ground, Common Future: How Ecoagriculture Can Help Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity (Report by Future Harvest and IUCN. News release, 08 May, 2001.

IUCN -The World Conservation Union (co-publisher of "Common Ground, Common Future").

"ISU defends ag budget cuts," By ANNE FITZGERALD, Des Moines Register Agribusiness Writer, 06/22/2003.

"Nauvoo, Ill., is singing the blues with loss of famous cheese factory," THE ASSOCIATED PRESS via St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 06/01/2003.

Organic Valley, a farmer owned and operated cooperative producing organic dairy products.

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 40 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

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The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.