The Maine Dairy Princesses visited our booth on Tuesday.
Our meetings are held 10am in the Lincoln Room, and 1pm in the Somerset Room today. Come join us!
US Sheep Milk Economics
First, if you haven’t already signed up to get Janet Fletcher’s excellent weekly/bi-weekly newsletter on artisan cheeses, I highly recommend you do. Fletcher used to write the cheese column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and is now a freelance cheese writer, and author and co-author of many books on food, most recently Cheese and Beer published by Andrews McMeel.
In this week’s newsletter Fletcher researches the closing of an award winning sheep milk cheese business (Many Fold Farm) in Georgia. It’s a sobering look at the tough economics of sheep dairying in the US, and worth taking a look at.
Cheese Makers Resource Conference 2017
In addition to the American Cheese Society conference, there is another national conference held for cheese makers — The Cheese Makers’ Resource Conference put together by Agri-Service and Dairy Heritage. It’s a bit smaller than the ACS conference and does not include a competition, but it’s held on the East Coast in most years — in New Holland, PA this year — it costs only $90 per day to attend (when registering before December 30th) so it’s possible to drive to it, and the lodging expenses can be lower. Still, many of the same speakers are featured such as Peter Dixon, Allen Sayler, and Dave Potter.
This year there are several sessions that deal with the new regulatory world brought in with the implementation of the Food Safety and Modernization Act. One of the sessions — How Do I Write Good GMPs? — is a topic that I hear frequently from other Guild members.