Willamette Valley Cheese

Hi, we're the Volvidus. We have a company called Willamette Valley Cheese. We're a farmstead cheese company where we milk the cows and milk Jersey cows and we make the cheese right after that. It's my wife, Melissa, my son Garrett and I'm Rod. And we all work together as a family to make cheese. Is that right Garrett? Yep. I come from a dairy background. My dad and my brother milk all Holsteins and Albany on our family farm and my wife and I started this one in 1993. I don'think we originally were going to dairy farm, but I think it's in the bloodstream of my husband'side and so it was just a natural fit. Right after we decided to farm, organic started to be very popular with a lot of the cons After we certified the land, we started to feed the cows all organic components and we had to do that for a whole year. So all the cows got all organic feed for a whole year and they were certified September of last year. We make a n The bourbon cause we're making today is a Gouda style cheese except it's with raw milk. We call our raw milk Gouda Bourbon Cause, which means farmer's cheese. The Bourbon Cause we try to use only grass fed milk. We do it usually in the spring and fall and it's a little bit of a special cheese for us. This is actually three milkings, it's a day and a half. It's a morning, a night, and a morning milk. Three milkings of the 62 Jersey cows that go into this plant. Today it's 5,000 pounds of milk. We should make probably about 40 to 45 cheese, groups of cheese out of that. We do it from the feed to the cheese and it varies a lot. We are seasonal and some of our cheeses do vary, so we let them know the variance is because of the feed situation in particular seasons.