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Walking the Land
As much as we talk about farms and the value of the small farmer, nothing beats actually getting on the land with the farmer. Working in this business, though, means a lot of time NOT on the land.
This past week, Karl and I spent many hours working on the floor plan of the new cheese house for the home farm. There’s a neat new cloud-computing program called Gliffy that will let you size rooms, drag and drop them, change a floorplan completely, try alternative flows, and then share the floor plans with others on line. Cheesemaking demands several precise environments, and our recipes have even more. So we’ve been having a great creative time figuring out the synergies between rooms that need many air exchanges and rooms that need low air exchange. That’s before you get to temperature, humidity, milk and cheese movement, and equipment movement, cycling through the wash room. And then there’s the staff movement, and the visitor movement. It’s just fascinating.
Then we backed into where the new barn needed to go. We’re taking the current, but obsolete barn for chilling, packing and shipping, as well as some office space. The new barn for the cows, we hope, will have voluntary milking systems that the ladies walk into when they need milking and their computer-chip collars give them permission. The cows are under much less stress, energy usage is substantially lower, and the quality and quantity of milk is better if it is all designed optimally. So the barn needs to be behind the cheese house to minimize piping from the milking parlors to the bulk tanks and be most efficient. We got it on paper, or rather on Gliffy, and it all looked like it would work. But, would it work on the somewhat rolling land? The barn needs to be on the flatest land possible for pretty obvious reasons. The cows need to be able to access pasture from as many sides as possible without large grade changes. Even a good topo map is not as reliable as actually getting on the land.
At 4:30 on that pretty dark afternoon, we scooted up to the farm with fingers crossed. We tape-measured the cheesehouse footprint, stepped off another 10 feet or so for margin of error, and paced off the barn. It was perfect. The design had pushed the barn into perhaps the best spot on the whole 120 acres.
I’ll tell you, being on the land with Karl, who has walked that farm since he could toddle, in the cold and wind and coming darkness, and seeing that barn appear before our very eyes, is something I will never forget. He really is a very quiet man, but I could see the vision in his eyes as well.
Then we looked at each other and chuckled. There’s a long way to travel between vision and reality. Right now, we have no idea how we’re going to get there. But we know that we are…going to get there.