How Dutch Gouda Cheese Is Made On A 150-Year-Old Family Farm | Big Business

Each wheel of Dutch

cheese

starts in a vat filled with millions of tiny curds, but I'm just checking to see if the CD is a bit evenly divided. The Netherlands produces almost one billion kilos of

cheese

a

year

, more than half of which is guda or hala. as pronounced here Franctin is a seven-generation dairy

farm

er. While most cheese is

made

in large factories using pasteurized milk, he makes a rare type of Howa using raw milk, but now

farm

ers fear his cheesemaking tradition may be at risk. The Netherlands could close hundreds of dairy farms to curb nitrogen emissions in 2017, the small country emitted more per hectare than any other European nation and about half of it comes from agriculture, especially animals that urinate and defecate.

The cows are not trained, so they defecate everywhere. These emissions threaten native forests and wildlife, but Critics say the country's emissions cuts are unfairly targeting livestock farmers and so how did Dutch farmers get stuck in a decades-old climate policy? and what does this mean for the rest of the world? Fran's

family

has been making cheese in the town of Zutu Valde for over 150

year

s. years, every day begins by heating more than 600 gallons of milk pumped from milking. The barn milk floating now is about 37°, just the body temperature of a cow, for each batch of cheese, add renit enzymes that make the proteins in the milk.

They clump together into solid curd leaving the liquid behind, the way it is refined is like a pair of scissors cutting the milk after 30 minutes a giant curd has formed, it should open like this, it looks good, this machine starts cutting it into pieces and we really cut it. small to have very little moisture in the cheese to make a cheese that can age for years Frank's parents taught him how to make cheese when he was 22 my brother and I had a seven generation ctin producing cheese and milking cows and well, there will be at least seven generations of cows walking on this farm and he took over the

family

business

with his brother in January 2022.

I think 50% of the Dutch have a great-grandfather who has been a farmer. shaped the landscape of the Netherlands in the 13th century, almost a fifth of what is now the Netherlands was under water over the centuries, the Dutch built dikes to contain the sea. Farmers drained large portions of reclaimed land to plant crops, but one of the only things that would grow on the wet soil was grass, so raising livestock for meat, milk and cheese became a big deal.

business

. The dairy industry eventually became a symbol of the Netherlands, as much as tulips and windmills, milk and cows.

The Dutch masterpieces of Grace de Vermier and Ben date back to the 20th century. In the 19th century, the Netherlands produced so much cheese that it was a valuable export. Today, almost all Dutch dairy farms sell their milk to large factories that pasteurize it and use machines to make cheese on a large scale, but Fran only works with raw milk, just 4% of the Dutch. Dairy Farms makes Hala at home like he does, we still produce it on the road like my great grandfather did and I don't know if that's very good but I like it and what the machines do in the factories, he still prefers to do it by hand like verify. the consistency of the Cur itself now is just warm, it's like almost 30° and the curd is very soft now and now all the curd here is like that deep down and there is no curd there anymore, but I'm just checking if the curd is a little divided into equal parts, equally spread, you can start to drain a little of that liquid, but nothing is wasted, you skim the fat to make butter and feed it to your pigs.

The pigs are already there. Happy only with the weight and I like butter on my sandwich in the morning, he cuts the leftover curd into sections large enough for a wheel of cheese, measures the correct amount by touch while Frank's employee, Savan, prepares the old buckets, most of which were Fran's grandparents. Only a handful of farmers in the Netherlands still use wooden buckets. Fran places a cloth under the surface and piles the curds on top. The cloth will help the last bit of whey drain off. He repeats the process for 12 wheels of cheese. It weighs a lot, so I think between 25 and 30 kg, something like that and it's comfortable.

These presses squeeze out the remaining liquid. All of this cheese comes from the milk of Frank's 200 female cows. The Netherlands has almost 1.6 million and produces a lot of nitrogen. Because they eat fertilizer, grass grown in the summer, and imported grains and soybeans year-round, their peas are also full of nitrogen and when it mixes with their feces it creates a gas called ammonia. Ammonia plumes fall on nature reserves and acidify the soil some nitrogen-loving plants like grass take over while other native plants cannot absorb adequate nutrients from there it is a domino effect many native plants weaken or snails die They cannot get enough nutrients to build their shells the birds that eat the snails cannot develop eggs or their chicks are born with brittle bones within one of the largest national parks in the Netherlands.

The foresters like anamik fer say that the oaks and the pines are dying, they are all sick, there is none, not a single one that I would say, oh you know, that is a very, very fit or very healthy tree, you can To say that the trees are starving, they are not receiving all the nutrients they need to be a very healthy and fully growing oak, environmentalists say that 14 habitats in the country are on the brink. In danger of collapse, the dairy sector is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss in the Netherlands back in 1992 2. What is now the European Union adopted a law known as the habitats directive that requires countries to designate natural areas for its conservation in order to comply with the policies introduced by the Netherlands. to reduce nitrogen on these protected lands.

Back then, Dutch farms had one of the highest ammonia emission rates in Europe. In 2019, the industry had reduced its emissions by almost 2/3. Covered manure storage, such as under this slatted floor, has helped if it remains sealed underground for enough time, the ammonia won't evaporate as much. Everywhere we were, there was a two M deep basement filled with manure and PE, but these efforts alone were not enough. The farms that released the most ammonia were located near these protected nature reserves. The nation's highest court said the Netherlands needed to do more, the government rushed to comply, with some lawmakers suggesting halving the number of animals in the country.

Farmers were outraged, protesting for weeks by dumping manure in the streets and blocking roads with tractors. 50% cut, but by then a broader political party called the Citizen Farmer Movement had swept the provincial election. Rick Lutters is a party leader in this area. We have a nitrogen law that is rigid and completely focused on dairy production. I want this law gone soon after the government announced a $1.6 billion plan to buy and close up to 3,000 high-emitting farms near nature reserves. A farmer can voluntarily accept the purchase and possibly get more than his farm is worth if Fran does not sell hers.

The seven-generation farm is not an option. He says his cows are like a family. This is Gina. She is the highest ranking. She is the leader of the land. She just carries other cows with her head mostly, so when she wants to drink, there's another boink move. Besides, I'm Gina, here I am and I want to drink, he even got married on this farm surrounded by his cows and it's tradition in his family to name the cows after relatives and uh, I also named the cow after my daughter, Frank and her brother. We milk the cows twice a day, first we clean the teeth starting from left front, right front, front, right rear and left rear, and then connect the milking claw, there is a little vacuum underneath to to suck the milk.

Fran gets approximately 8 gallons of milk per day from each cow, which she can milk in 15 minutes she would have taken her grandfather an entire day. New technology helped. Dairy and live farms were consolidated from the mid-20th century onwards. Small farmers. Teese manufacturers quit and the bigger ones got bigger. To this day, between 70 and 80% of the country's dairy products are shipped abroad, mainly to other European countries, all this in the region between, say, London, Paris and Berlin, within an area of 800 km in the US, that would be called a local product. The Netherlands is also the EU's largest meat exporter.

Every year they market around $9 billion worth of pork and poultry internationally, and they do so in a territory not much larger than the US state of Maryland. In much of the world, the Netherlands became a highway. map on how to farm efficiently at scale, but environmentalists like Natasha Orlans of the World Wildlife Fund see it differently. I see the Netherlands as an example of where everything went wrong by exporting meat and dairy and having a lot of manure here in the Netherlands, which caused all these environmental and social problems, the farmers we spoke to said that saving The environment should go hand in hand with the preservation of its centuries-old traditions.

Traditions like turning the cheese in the first 24 hours of the cheese, we turn it about six times, turning it secures both sides of the wheel. It will be round like the curve of the cube. You will see that it is already turning yellow, so that is a good sign. Then move the cheese wheels to a salty brine. The salt bath is mainly to make a crust around the cheese. You will get a little salt. digs deeper into the cheese to give it some flavor Fran ages her specialty Hala for up to 10 years at a constant temperature of 59°.

This is one from 2013 so now it's 10 years old and it still looks shiny and it still looks young here it stores hundreds of Cheese Wheels worth over $100,000 every day we turn them over put an extra layer of coating on top of them for the liquid plastic coating to seal out moisture and of course to keep mold away, you hear it when I pick it up, it gets stuck on the shell, so that's why you turn it over and it ages. Friendly bacteria accumulate amino acids. These crystals are where the flavor of the cheese comes from. Fran can say that he is aging well because of The Sound.

It's nice, flat. Here you hear it. Fran is one of more than 45,000 people working in the Dutch dairy industry, if you take only half the farmers, half the jobs and half the income, where are these people going to work? They probably go to the cities and all over the world. uh, villages in the countryside will become ghost towns. I think in 10 or 15 years I'll be worried about who will produce our food and where it will come from. Many farmers now face a difficult decision: make the purchase, reduce their herds, move their farms or make costly improvements to try to reduce nitrogen emissions, but not everyone can afford costly innovations.

Many farmers are working on tight margins or are already in debt. Farmers don't get a loan from the bank because they say, "Oh, we don't know if." can still farm after this registration because of these regulations, plus farmers don't even know yet if Innovations could really save their farm from closure. Researchers at Venan University hope to do so. This is not a commercial farm, it is a research center that is Keys. D coning runs the University's Dairy campus and his team is testing different iterations of Fran's slatted floor. We can run TW where we separate the urine and solids.

They are also studying the effect of robotic scrapers and poop vacuums on quickly moving waste. in closed storage voids they reduce the loss of methane and ammonia, but Keys estimates that one like this could cost more than $20,000 and a 120-cow farm would need two. Key says changing the cows' diet is a cheaper option, so can we feed the cows in such a way that we have less? Ammonia emission or less nitrogen losses. Her team feeds the cows different combinations of foods and then uses these feeders to test how much the animals eat and their emissions. The electronic identification system is identified so we know exactly which cow is in the box.

Innovations cannot help farmers still have the option to purchase almost 1,000 head of cattle in November 2023. The farms hadregistered for it, almost a quarter were dairy farms, but the government won't pay them for a while, which will take at least another while. six months to a year before the end of the same month, a new right-wing party PVV won the most seats in the country's parliamentary elections Harro Builders, the party's leader spoke at farmers protests earlier in the year , our farmers are being killed by some left-liberal idiots So-Cal nitrogen problem in the Netherlands the party has signaled that it wants to stop government spending on initiatives to reduce nitrogen, including the fund for the purchase plan Rick hopes that the pbv form a coalition with other pro-farer parties so we can make new laws is quite simple but a coalition could take months the world wildlife fund says this delay will only lead to further deterioration of nature while farmers are in the limbo it is the Li Libo that paralyzes the agricultural sector and that limbo is very dangerous for nature Also because it is still suffering horribly and I can feel for them that this problem is not exclusive to the Netherlands.

Dairy farmers in Ireland may have to reduce the size of their herds due to dangerous levels of nitrogen in rivers that are causing algae blooms. New Zealand has some of the most polluted waterways in the world. Dairy farming is one of the largest sources of these dangerous levels of nitrate in drinking water, and in the US state of California, agriculture has contributed to dangerous air pollution, all These countries will have to deal with the same questions that the Netherlands faces today: how we feed ourselves, preserve tradition, keep economies running and protect our planet. I don't see myself opposing farmers.

I am opposed to the system as it is now, it is ecologically a disaster and it is also not giving farmers an adequate income so basically it is a system that is breaking down and that system needs to be fixed and it seems open to a solution too if it helps to nature or the weather brings it, maybe then your family can continue making cheese for another seven generations. I hope that dairy farmers have a future in the Netherlands. I think we are really connected to the landscape. I hope the farms don't grow too big so that can be. running on a family scale uh I think it's a beautiful way to live