On today’s KVNF Farm Friday we take you to Western Culture Creamery just outside of Paonia, Colorado on Matthews Lane. The five acre farm featuring goats and cheese participated in this year's Mountain Harvest Festival farm tours.
The annual harvest celebration is held the last weekend in September in the North Fork Valley. KVNF Senior Reporter Lisa Young spoke with David Miller in front of his farm store as his wife Suanne continued to make cheese inside their quaint farm store.
WESTERN CULTURE CREAMERY
Located just outside of Paonia on Matthews Lane sits a small farm with a big heart. Western Culture Creamery is a farmstead creamery, meaning that the livestock used in the cheese making process are right on the premise along with the milking facility and cheese making room.
"Western Culture is a play on words. The fact that we're in western Colorado and culture is, well, it's what makes cheese. Cheese," said owner David Miller.
"This is very much an old world way of making cheese in the sense that everything is right here and we provide all of our own milk and stuff. So it allows us to really handcraft the cheese exactly how we want to."
The process allows the family farm to have complete control over the health and the nutrition of the goats for the milk they use to make cheese. Miller said their farm offers a unique connection with the livestock and with the cheese making process, "there's not too many layers between it."
HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
David and Suanne started Western Culture Creamery in 2015 with very little knowledge on how to run a goat farm.
" We came out here in 2015 from Boulder, Colorado. My wife had been taking cheese making classes and decided, 'hey, why don't we make cheese?' And, you know, do this ourselves and sell it at a farmers market," said Miller, chuckling.
"We're both very naive to this because neither of us had grown up with farming and animals and animal husbandry and commercial dairy, that sort of thing. So within that naive nature, we were like, yeah, sure, why not? Let's go for it."
After looking around the state for properties, the Millers settled on a piece of land in the fertile North Fork Valley. The farm was a blank slate that allowed the couple to develop it for cheese making and goat raising.
"We didn't have any resources to really go to so, we had to learn how to do our medical procedures. We had to learn how to build fencing. We had to learn how to repair pumps when they go down and all that sort of thing. It was a lot of YouTube and a lot of research, but we made it through and every year since has been a growing experience," Miller said.
PERSEVERANCE PAYS OFF
With perseverance and determination the Millers developed and improved their farming operation and systems year after year.
"So we started in 2015 with fourteen goats. We started with four goats being in milk, meaning they had just kidded and they were producing milk. So, the next morning got very real for me. I had four goats to milk, and this is something I had never really done before. So, fast forward to now, I've delivered well over seven hundred kids."
Right now the Millers have about fifty six goats on the property and milk twenty eight of them twice a day. As part of the goat raising process, the couple also grow their own hay for the goats.
"So we have about five and a half acres here. I have about three acres in hay fields
around. When we moved here, these were horse pastures. We redeveloped them to grow hay and such and and then that's what obviously we feed our goats to. But, I do have to supplement with hay that I buy locally as well," Miller said adding that goats are very picky about what they eat in the pasture.
"They have access to pasture right now, but they're back there eating hay. In the last three years I have not cut hay, I'm doing rotational grazing or, say, browsing with the goats. So, we move them from paddock to paddock using electrical fencing and we kind of keep them in areas and let other areas rejuvenate and then bring them to another area," Miller said.
CHEESE MADE ON THE FARM IS SOLD ON THE FARM
Western Culture Creamery also runs a small farm store just behind their private residence.
"We sell all the cheeses that Suanne produces in the farm store, as well as some that we don't offer for wholesale. The store has been wonderful because it's really allowed us to insert ourselves into the community, get to know people. We definitely have regular customers and such," Miller said, tagging on that the goats are a big thing for their agritourism efforts.
"It's part of the attraction of it all. We encourage people to mingle with the goats. We walk them out there, we tell them the 'do's and don'ts 'when they're with the either the kids or the adult goats and such. A lot of farms don't necessarily offer that experience."
