Welcome to the Spring Brook Farm Cheese House . . .
And discover all the new and exciting ways our kids are learning!
At Farms for City Kids our innovative hands-on learning program is how we bring education to life for our kids. And so from the moment the children step off the school bus at Spring Brook Farm, their learning lessons begin.
Lessons for a Lifetime®
As they take in their first impressions of the Farm’s landscape, a sense of sustainability and land stewardship is instilled by helping them realize that they, just like everyone on the Farm, must take nothing for granted when it comes to the respect and caring for the environment and the animals around us. And even though Spring Brook Farm, like the many farmlands across America, represent the single most important foundation of our food supply chain today, most children, when asked the question, “Where does our food come from?” answer with the response, “From the store”.
So in our commitment to further evolve our educational mission, through a generous gift from Jim and Karli Hagedorn, the Spring Brook Farm Cheese House was built to help children truly understand that the answer to the question of where their food comes from is so much more than simply ‘From the store’. And it is the Spring Brook Farm Cheese House that plays a vital role in opening up many new levels of instruction to connect our kids to the world around them.
As Carmen Diaz of PS 20, one of the teachers to visit Spring Brook Farm with her class, said, “We love when a curriculum comes to life for our students. We want the kids to have the opportunity to see how food is grown and harvested, to experience how much work goes into taking care of animals and the importance of teamwork and how everyone and everything is important and affects our environment and our well being.”
This learning experience comes full circle at the Cheese House through the production of our all natural Tarentaise cheese, just one more example of how the Farm takes the lead in supporting itself and our educational mission. The cheese making process visually demonstrates all that it takes to get food to our tables -- through the careful and deliberate partnership of the cheese maker and the farmer in the care of the fields, our natural resources and all living things, both those we can see – like the cows – and those we cannot – like bacteria and microbes.
Life before the cheese house left our young farming students with one never ending question, “What happens to the milk?” While discussions about pasteurization and how milk can be turned into cheese or butter took place, the reality for a young mind is still – “What happens to the milk?” NOW the children can witness firsthand exactly what happens to the milk!
From Milk to Cheese – “Phew . .it takes a lot more work than we thought”
At a very base level the Cheese House offers a physical truth that the milk from the cow the students just tended can be turned into food through a very basic chemical process. So we first engage the students in conversations about the air, water, sunlight and care that animals need in order to survive and flourish as well as their importance to all aspects of the farm – from the barns, to the gardens, to our pastures.
The cheese making process actually begins in the well-managed
pastures the cows graze on every day.
Through careful management by our field foreman and herd manager, our
After a day of grazing, the cows rest or eat hay in the barn before milking and their evening meal. Everything they have eaten throughout the day will be reflected in the taste and quality of their milk. This, combined with the different pastures, gives our Tarentaise cheese its unique aroma and flavor. Even the weather has a direct impact on the smell and flavor of our cheese because weather affects the nutrients in the grasses and the overall growth of the pastures.
After every fourth milking, the milk is pumped over to the cheese house. A sample is drawn from each batch and analyzed in the lab for different components such as protein, fat and bacteria. The same aspects that apply to the animals apply to the cheese -- air, water (humidity) and care, in the rubbing and flipping over of our cheese, so the good bacteria can get to work helping our cheese to age and taste delicious.
Bacteria is just one part of the cheese maker’s recipe that is a complex mixture of special bacteria and microbes that have been formulated and cultured through the centuries – hence, the term culture. The discussion of cultures provides the perfect opportunity for us to introduce the concept that life surrounds us, even though we cannot see it and the subject of micro biology is introduced.
Making cheese from the dairy farm’s primary product, milk,
can only happen by carefully using some of these ‘unseen’ and most manageable
animals on the farm. Without bacteria
and microbes, the soil could not support the plants, which harvest the sun’s
energy. Dead organic matter could not be
transformed into usable nutrients for all that grows on the farm and we would
not have the opportunity to utilize certain species of these microbes to help
us product one of the most amazing products that can come from any farm . . . CHEESE!
Bringing Education to Life!
And the Cheese House brings these organisms to life. The Cheese House lab provides special agar dishes, which the students use to swap surfaces, including fingers and hands, so they can watch as the collected bacteria start to grow over the course of their stay. The samples are then identified under a microscope to answer some important questions, “Are there tiny ‘bugs’ that are helpful to us? How can these tiny, little objects be beneficial? Which are the bugs that can be harmful? and How do we resolve the problem of harmful bacteria in the milk”?
As a team, children are coached through the process of making cheese, right from the raw milk collection in the dairy barn, to the heating and cooking process, to the adding of culture and cutting of the curds. The final step is pressing and forming in the molds. Sounds simple on paper, but to see the excitement in the eyes of the children as they are entrusted with the fine measurement of temperature, to performing some of the steps in the washing and rubbing of the ‘student cheese’ wheels, all the while following instructions to the finest of details that have been passed down to us by world respected cheese makers, is AWESOME. The children feel empowered, respected and important.
Without question the addition of the Cheese House to the Farms for City Kids program has been invaluable, allowing our educational staff to integrate more hands-on science into the program though our student’s participation in various experiments related to the cheese making process. It demonstrates that just because something does not look “alive” and you can’t see it growing, does not mean that it doesn’t require constant care and attention to flourish.
The important work the students participate in on the farm, and in the cheese house, is just one more way to help them learn that careful planning, hard work, communication, respect, teamwork and a positive attitude will always have a positive impact on their own lives and those around them. And one of those ‘aha’ moments happens that very night at dinner as they eat their homemade Tarentaise Mac ‘n cheese and taste the rewards of good stewardship, as it is now so evident that well managed, happy cows make delicious cheese!
As their week comes to an end, our students
leave Spring Brook Farm changed, having witnesses firsthand exactly where and
how food makes its way from the farmlands of
To learn more about our Spring Brook Farm Tarentaise cheese, visit us at www.sbfcheese.org
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