Should Raw-Milk Cheese Cost More?

Andy Hatch of Wisconsin’s Uplands Cheese makes exclusively raw-milk cheese from the milk of his own herd. I asked him if raw milk cost more to produce than conventional milk. What follows is his written reply:

“It's fair to say that high-quality raw milk destined for raw-milk cheese costs significantly more to produce than milk destined for pasteurization.

Feed: Most raw-milk cheesemakers would agree that their cows shouldn't eat fermented feed. The cost of producing fermented corn silage in Wisconsin, per dry matter ton, is approximately half of what it costs to produce the equivalent in dry hay. I know because we make both on our farm (silage for winter feed, dry hay for Rush Creek season).

Labor: Producing clean milk takes more time and care than producing dirty milk, mostly because of the care required to properly clean udders. In our case, when we're selling off-season milk destined for pasteurization, we're comfortable milking our 160 cows with a single person. When milking for cheese, we always use two people. I think it's fair to say that milking labor for raw-milk cheese is (or should be) double that for pasteurized milk. In our case, that probably equates to another 1.5 full-time employees on the farm, as you don't want to burn people out by asking them to milk twice a day, every day.

Milking equipment cleaning and sanitation: The regulatory standards for cleaning milking equipment are far more lax than those imposed upon cheese plants, presumably because we assume the milk is destined for pasteurization. This allows most conventional barns to clean their milking equipment and pipelines for far less cost (in time, equipment, chemicals, fuel). A raw- milk cheese barn, however, has to treat its milking equipment no differently than its cheesemaking equipment, since there is effectively no division between the two. The result is that our barn is equipped with a very expensive, high-temp boiler, pricey chemicals and employees who hand scrub every inch of the parlor after every milking.

In my estimation, the net sum of the factors above probably leads to a total cost increase of about $6-7/cwt, or approximately 30% of the $21/cwt cost of production average in the Midwest. Those figures will of course change in different regions, based on the costs of producing or buying feed, and of paying employees, but I think it's a fair estimate. Rough milk-production cost estimates often suggest that a dairy farm's costs are one-third feed, one-third labor and one-third everything else. High-quality raw milk production requires a farm to dial up both of the two biggest cost categories.”

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