Friday-Sunday July 29-31 Thorp Wi

You can probably tell from my more frequent posts of late that we are now at a park where my broadband card at least works. We arrived in Lacrosse WI on Sun. eve. But let me go back and tell you where we were last weekend. We decided we wanted to do some cheese plant tours. Yes, despite spending weeks in Wi last year we did not do a tour of a cheese plant! There was an interesting plant in Thorp, a couple of hours away so we found a county
campground about 10 min so South of there. We called and they weren't making cheese on Fri. because they were having an open house on Sat. OK we could do that.
I was a little concerned about checking into a county campground with no reservation on a weekend, and looking for a site for a rig our size. We love the county parks out here, we're always surprised, never disappointed. So we went straight there. The first four sites he gave us were impossible to get into, but we found one in another part of the park and we were set.
We had a back up dairy, Nasonville over in Marshfield, and went there in the afternoon. We met Kirk, who proved to be the son-in-law of the owner. Nasonville, like most cheese makers in WI is family owned, and operated. As we toured the plant, Kirk introduced us to the owners son, who was driving a tow motor loading a semi, and others in the family. There were still about 50 employees and they run around the clock. They have their own fleet of trucks to pick up milk from local farms.
Curd Production
They test for contaminants, and quality before unloading. The quality of milk, the butterfat, and other ingredients is extremely important to Wisconsin cheesmaking. Back in the late 1800's early 1900's Wisconsin had a very poor reputation for cheese. In Chicago, they refused to buy it because it was so bad. A University of Wisconsin faculty member researched the components of cheese, and the milk it was made form and came up with a tester and a scoring system which he encouraged all WI dairy farmers to adopt. Because they were selling so little cheese a few did out of desperation, and got a tremendous response.
40 # Block for pizza
They quickly adopted a number of standard WI procedures and a license to make and sell WI cheese. In a relatively few years WI was winning awards around the world for their quality. It was a lesson they never forgot, and we heard it everywhere we went.
This relatively small company produces an immense quantity of cheese which they primarily sell to re packagers who shred it for the pizza market on the east coast. When you buy a pizza, you are probably eating Nasonville cheese. They also produce an immense quantity of Feta cheese also for the re packagers. A few years ago they produced one quarter of the US consumption. Here are blocks of Feta settling. The warehouse photo shows the Feta cheese in the white boxes. To give you an idea of the scale of this small little dairy and cheesemaking operation, they bring in one million pounds of milk per day to produce 100,000 lbs of cheese!
As we were leaving Kirk's wife came up with a DVD her uncle made. Kirk had found out Liz was a teacher, and they give this to the teachers who bring their students to the company. They both made this tour very personal, and we were delighted to meet them.
The next day we went to a small Norwegian farm called "Holland's Family Farm" the home of Marieke Gouda cheeses. By co-incidence they were having their 2nd open house Saturday. The story here is pretty typical of farms in WI, even today. Land is very scarce in Holland, so good young farmers come to America and Canada for opportunities. Rolf Penterman and his brother were in Canada looking for farms, and met Marieke there. The brothers later decided to by an abandoned farm in WI, Marieke came to visit them. She and Rolf married (it's a cute story, that's her and her daughter) and she, being the driven person she was, obtained a cheese-making license, and began producing her native dutch cheese -Gouda. She was extremely successful, winning numerous awards immediately. Her husband and his brother are perfectionist farmers. They have world class operation here, milking 750 cows. Marieke uses 10% of their production for her cheeses, the rest is sold to Land of Lakes for butter. This is a classic American story of an immigrant family coming to our country, and creating jobs. The Penterman's employ about 20 people in the cheese and the dairy buisness.
Believe us when we tell you that Calif. cows have nothing on the Pentereman's girls. Talk about pampered! They never graze, being fed only a select diet of their favorite grain, and hay. They have brushes that rotate when a cow stands underneath them, to scratch their backs! Our guide said that she asked Rolf after working there for several months, why she never heard a cow moo there. He told her mooing is a sign of distress. There were many other dairy men in our tour group, and they all concurred, with envy, these young men are doing it right. What a pleasure it was to see this family working hard, contributing, and being successful