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NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n MARCH 2018 n GOURMET NEWS N H 8 2 Recurrent Droughts a Threat to California Specialty Cheese By Lorrie Baumann Catalina bleats insistently from her pen in the Toluma Farms nursery barn as farmer Tamara Hicks approaches. Slender and long- haired, Hicks has the sun-kissed complexion of a woman who spends much of her time outdoors, and she doesn't have the bottle that Catalina, a pure white Saanen kid born sev- eral weeks ago, is hoping for. Toluma Farms is a 160-acre farm in west Marin County, California, and Hicks and her husband, David Jablons, bought this farm in the rolling hills near Point Reyes in 2003 with the idea that they could become agents of change in the local food production sys- tem and in the debate about climate change. "We made a conscious decision that we could be part of the conversation about restoring the land," Hicks says. They've sunk most of their children's potential inher- itance into this property, and over the past few years, as it's increasingly affected by cli- mate change, California is giving them a practical lesson in what the state's climate means to the future of local food. The period from 2012 through 2014 was the driest three-year period ever in terms of statewide precipitation; exacerbated by record warmth, with the highest statewide average temperatures ever recorded in 2014. Every California county has been included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture's drought designations at various times be- tween the beginning of 2012 and the end of 2014, when the state passed its first-ever law designed to protect the state's groundwater from the effects of too much pumping for agricultural purposes. Unlike most other natural disasters, drought is a gradual crisis, occurring slowly over a period of time. There's no sudden event that announces it, and it's not usually ended by any one rain storm. The impacts of drought get worse the longer the drought continues, as reservoirs are depleted and water levels decline in groundwater basins. Marin and Sonoma Counties have been the heart of northern California's dairy industry since 1856, when Clara Steele made the first known batch of cheese in this part of the country from a recipe she found in a book. Hicks and Jablons take some solace in the knowledge that this property has a long his- tory of having sufficient water. California's most significant historical droughts have been a six-year drought in 1929-1934 – the Dust Bowl years, the two year-drought of 1976-77 – a comparatively short drought that nevertheless had very serious effects on the state's groundwater, and another six-year drought in 1987-1992. The 1929-1934 drought was comparable to the most severe dry periods in more than a millennium of re- constructed climate data, but its effects were small by present-day standards because the state's urban population and agricultural de- velopment are much greater now. When they found this property, 18 miles west of Petaluma, in an area where they'd been coming for weekend camping excur- sions for years, it was a dilapidated farm with a history of dairy production that had been abandoned and the pastures neglected. Ten thousand old tires had been piled on a hill- side in an ill-advised attempt to prevent the slope from eroding and were spilling down into the road. Other discarded junk had been dumped around the house or buried in back- hoed pits. Neither Hicks nor Jablons had any expe- rience in farming – Hicks is a clinical psy- chologist and Jablons is a surgeon, both with busy practices in San Francisco – but they felt that their financial resources, their skills in forming and maintaining helpful relation- ships with other people and their commit- ment to their values could see them through the challenges of returning the farm to its historic use as a productive dairy farm. "It's a good thing that we are both equally com- mitted to the idea of restoring the farm to health and making a statement about the value of sustainable agriculture and a healthy food system," Hicks says. Otherwise, she adds, their marriage might not have survived the challenges of figuring out how to turn derelict pastures and an ad hoc landfill into a financially and ecologically sustainable family farm. After more than a decade of work with the Natural Resources Conserva- tion Service to rehabilitate the pastures, haul- ing away the tires and other garbage, building a guesthouse that's rented out for in- depth educational farm stays and meeting space, and opening a creamery for making cheese, the farm hasn't yet fulfilled that dream of sustainability. Hicks is hopeful that the artisan cheeses from the Tomales Farm- stead Creamery she opened on the property in 2013 will be the final piece in a patchwork of enterprises the couple operates to support the farm, but returning the land to health will probably take a few more decades, she esti- mates. "We're not profitable yet," she says. "I'm not sure if it's possible to make a living as farmstead cheese producers." Tomales Farmstead Creamery makes and sells five cheeses made from the milk of its herd of 200 goats and more than 100 East Friesian sheep. The cheeses all have names that reflect the heritage of the coastal Miwok Indians who lived here before the Europeans arrived. Kenne is a soft-ripened goat cheese with a wrinkly Geotrichum rind that's aged for three weeks. Teleeka is a soft-ripened cheese made with goat, sheep and Jersey cow milk – the only one in the collection that's not a farmstead cheese, since the Jer- sey milk comes from Marissa Thornton's dairy farm just down the road. Assa, a word that means "female" is an aged goat cheese with a chardonnay-washed rind. The name is a tribute to the many women who work on the farm as well as the female animals that produce the milk. Liwa is a fresh goat cheese aged just three days – the name means "water." Atika is an aged sheep and goat cheese with a McEvoy Olive Oil rind. Atika won a second-place award from the Ameri- can Cheese Society in 2014, in the cream- ery's first time to enter the awards contest. Following the Call of the Wild Sausage By Lorrie Baumann Business consultants are fond of pointing out that threats and opportunities are often two sides of the same situation, and on an even more cliched note, you'd have very little trouble finding a poster that advises you that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. If you want to follow that line of thinking down a well-traveled metaphorical pathway, you'll have no trou- ble at all making the mental leap from half a million feral hogs rooting up crops in Louisiana to gourmet sausage. So let's talk gourmet sausage. Meet Charlie Mun- ford, Mississippi Farmer and the Founder and Owner of Charlie's Sausage. After earning a masters degree at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Stud- ies, he came back to Louisiana to take over his grandfather's 300- acre farm, Two Run Farm, in Vaughan, Mis- sissippi, where he's been raising animals that he harvested and butchered, along with ani- mals from other local farms, for sale to local customers and then eventually to New Or- leans chefs. In 2014, he purchased the Springfield Slaughter House, a state-in- spected facility. As a farmer who was also buying animals from other farmers to process in his slaugh- terhouse, Munford was talking to those other farmers, and he started hearing that they were having problems with feral hogs. Ac- cording to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries, feral hogs are present in all of Louisiana's 64 parishes. The popu- lation has been estimated at 500,000, and the department estimates that, because these hogs are so fertile, about 75 percent of them should be harvested each year just to keep the population stable. "Other farmers started telling me they were spending lots of time and money catching these wild hogs to keep them out of their crops," Munford says. "I started talking to other farmers, who were saying that the hogs were a nui- sance.... They're an invasive species, and the population has been expanding rapidly over the last 15 years, with land use change and the lack of hunting pressure. It's great for peo- ple to have another option." At right about that same time, the chefs to whom he was selling the local meat he was processing for them started asking him about wild boar sausage. "I had my ear to the ground listening to these chefs," Munford says. You see where this is going. "That was in 2014," Munford says. "We started planning it out and started the harvesting program in 2015.... The Louisiana Depart- ment of Agriculture & Forestry gave us a lot of help setting up a harvest program, so that it could be legal and under inspection." Over the course of a year of planning, Oc- tavia Fortier, the company's Executive Chef and Chief Executive Officer, developed recipes for three authentic varieties of sausage that she made from combinations of the wild boar meat and pork shoulder ground coarsely and mixed with earthy spices. The three flavors are Original, Green Onion, and Mild. Her technique borrows from the wis- dom of Munford's business partners at Wayne Jacobs Smokehouse in LaPlace, Louisiana, known for their andouille sausage. "She probably did each recipe 50 times before being satisfied with it," Mun- ford says. The pork shoulder that's added into the boar meat ensures the flavor of wild game while keeping the sausage affordable, since wild boar costs about three times of the price of conventional pork by the time Munford pays the licensed trappers, transports the meat to his processing facility and accounts for comparatively low yield of the carcasses. "You'd think it'd be cheaper, but it's not," he says. The sausage is smoked in a custom-built stainless steel smokehouse that sits inside the processing plant. Outside the plant, a fire-box burns seasoned water oak fire- wood, and a vacuum sys- tem draws the smoke over the sausage so that the smoke penetrates the natural casing, the heat renders the fat and the meat is preserved. "We make it the traditional ar- tisanal Cajun way – hard wood fire, smoky, like with a fireplace," Munford says. "We actu- ally burn logs in a low-heat fireplace, so it's a traditional, natural method. It takes a lot longer, but the flavor is so superior when you do it that way." Charlie's Sausage retails for $4.99 for a 12-ounce package. While distribution is cur- rently distributed regionally, it's now pro- duced under U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection, so it's available for sale outside Louisiana. A portion of the profits from the sale of the product goes to conservation of the Gulf South longleaf pine forests, which are threatened by development. In partner- ship with organizations like the Longleaf Al- liance, preservation of the native longleaf pine forests will save a vanishing ecosystem that now occupies less than 3 percent of its historical range and that provides important wildlife habitat for a variety of species, in- cluding game birds, deer and fox squirrels, according to Munford. "We're just trying to keep the boar under control and make a re- ally delicious product," he says. "It's all been driven by our customers, and they're the rea- son for it." For more information about wholesale availability, contact Via Fortier at 855.601.2RUN or via@tworunfarm.com.