Sweet Home Alabama:
A Labor of Love Founded On Cheese 
by Keith Richards 
(This article was originally printed in Southern Sustainable Farming, issue no. 1, July 1994, published by Southern SAWG.) 

ELBERTA, Alabama--Down along the Gulf coast of Baldwin County, Bermuda grass pastures form a checkered pattern in the thick pine, oak, magnolia and bayberry woods. Although farming has been part of the landscape for over a century, this is an area associated with shrimping more than milking, and cheese-making is absolutely unheard of. Or was unheard of until Alyce Birchenough and Doug Wolbert bought 40 acres here nine years ago.

Heading out of Elberta towards the Florida state line, never more than 10 or 12 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, colorful handmade signs point the way down a dirt road to Sweet Home Farm, "Home of Alabama's Original Farmstead Cheese." There at the end of the lane, Alyce and Doug have created a farm enterprise that centers around making cheese and selling it to the increasing number of people who come to this corner of the world.

East of the central yard on Sweet Home Farm sit a cattle loafing shed, milking parlor, cheese-making room and cheese storage cooler. This is the heart of their operation, where Alyce and Doug transform the milk into more than 15 varieties of cheese.

Inside you can feel the three strands of their guiding philosophy: self-sufficiency, valuing quality over quantity, and shaping work around what they love. Doug built the buildings and installed the equipment himself, mostly from materials he salvaged or recycled, so the place has a hybrid feeling of functionality combined with whimsy. The last rays of sunlight will filter through a well-placed piece of stained glass and shine onto bricks salvaged from a demolished motel.

On the evening I visited, Alyce was milking eight cows, bringing them into the small parlor and hooking them to automatic milkers two at a time. As she calmly handled the animals without benefit of stanchions, Alyce told me about their decision to install an automatic milk line. Each piece of technology on their farm has been weighed between the savings it brings in time and energy, and the quality it adds or detracts from their lives and their products. When they first put the line in, they milked enough to make one batch of cheese, then disconnected it for two months until they could judge the final product. Luckily the automation didn't detract from the quality of their cheese, so now they save an hour per milking by not having to hand carry the milk from cows to tank.

They usually milk about 12 cows at any given time, keeping another 12 heifers and dry cows as replacements. Their herd is based on the amount of milk they need to produce 10,000 pounds of cheese per year. Averaging four to eight gallons of milk per cow per day, their goal is to produce a target amount of cheese with the fewest number of cows. If one of the Guernseys goes below four gallons of production for long, she's a likely candidate for culling.

Recently, they added beef cattle to their operation, so when milk cows lose productivity, they are used as brood cows. The Guernseys are bred with Angus or Brangus bulls to produce a 3/4 Angus, 1/4 Guernsey feeder cow. These are sold at a local auction when they reach 300 to 500 pounds.

While Alyce milked the cows, Doug was on the west side of the farmyard, beyond the canning kitchen, machine shop and old restored farmhouse, milking four Nubian goats by hand. The goats average one gallon of milk per goat per day, providing variety to the Sweet Home products, complimentary grazing on their pastures, and lively personalities to the farm.

As I watched Doug rapidly fill buckets with milk, I asked about the origin of their stock. He told me they keep closed herds, artificially inseminating all their cows and naturally breeding the goats. Again, quality counts.

Doug says, "Raising your own stock gives you a totally different relationship with the animals from when you buy them." It also keeps him from being tempted to buy some animal with a pedigree or papers. "Papers don't mean a thing to me." He points out, "When an animal has papers it only causes you to hang onto her longer." 

Looking For a Farm-Based Business 

Alyce met Doug in Michigan, where he was running his own sawmill and collecting usable "junk." After marrying in 1978, they began looking for a home-based business. Alyce says, "We didn't know what we were doing."

Earlier, Alyce had received a bachelors degree in Food & Nutrition from Southeastern Louisiana University and had a propensity towards "making" food. Doug gave her a Jersey cow for a wedding present, and despite it's horns and nasty disposition, they liked having the fresh milk. So they sold the Jersey, bought a Guernsey, and Alyce began experimenting with making cheese. After reading books and practicing on her own, she took a course at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. By 1983, she and Doug decided cheese was to be the foundation of their farm.

While they built up a foundation herd, Doug raised a barn and Alyce raised capital by working at factory jobs. In 1985 they moved to Alabama, bringing their cows, lumber, bricks, equipment, and even a chicken coop. Doug built more buildings and worked as a well driller while Alyce worked on the farm. Meanwhile, they shipped milk to a local coop for two more years.

Slowly, through sweat equity, Sweet Home Farm grew. "We went to the local inspectors before we put up our first brick here to help us with the design and so on," explains Alyce. They wanted to make sure they met all the health and building codes from the start. Once they did, they obtained a commercial license for making cheese and they were in business.

Now they make a batch of cheese every three to four days. Alyce has 15 varieties that she makes regularly, including Bama Jack, Gouda, Montabella, Feta, Edam, Cajun Spice, Dagano, Garden Vegetable, Baldwin Swiss, Blue, Garlic Blue, Romano, Pepato Asiago and Cheese Fudge. She says the amount is based on their market. If she made only two, they would need more markets.

She will sometimes make an unusual variety for special occasions or special orders. And Alyce makes small amounts of both hard and soft goat's milk cheese seasonally. All the varieties are aged for at least 60 days to fulfill the health requirements for raw milk cheese.

As by-products, Alyce also makes cottage cheese and sour cream butter that she sells for $5.00 per pound--there is a waiting list of customers for the butter. Doug drinks most of the buttermilk, saying it is a perfect replacement drink for the fluids and minerals lost through sweating on hot, humid Gulf days.

Often people ask Alyce, "If you make the cheese, what does Doug do?"

This is a joke between them, because Doug describes himself as "naturally hyperactive." The day I visited, Doug had a full page list of things to do before lunch, including "hug Alyce." Besides building, repairing and milking, he has also learned to make cheese so Alyce can get away for more than one or two days at a time--not that she does. 

Tending the Land 

One of Doug's favorite chores is tending to their land. Before buying the property, he studied soil maps and discovered there was a small band of soil with good structure between the sandy soils along the Gulf and heavy red clay further inland. This is where Sweet Home Farm lies.

The farm's original 40 acres is broken into six paddocks surrounding the central yard. About 11 acres along the lowest land is in woods, and one hay field is beyond the woods on the west side.

"All of our fields have a border of woods for shade and a little herbal," explains Doug. That's important for the cows this far south.

Doug walks the pastures every day so he can better understand his land. He believes he had an advantage in coming to this place without preconceived notions. He says he wasn't set in any patterns or trained to think by so-called experts. He came with an open mind, asked lots of questions of his neighbors, and observed.

Besides neighbors, Doug gets his information from old agricultural books. He advises, "You have to sift through the bad, like recommendations for DDT." He also consults charts from Extension. "The Extension service is not on the cutting edge, but they do have the basics," says Doug encouragingly.

Doug has tried all kinds of grass and legume mixtures in the pastures, but likes alicia Bermuda grass interplanted with Haifa clover (an Isreali variety), oats and Puna chicory. He says the cows seem to really like the big leafed clover, and the chicory is high in crude protein. He seeds them at a rate of 2 lbs to the acre for the chicory, 3 lbs for the clover, and 100 lbs for the oats. After some searching he found a John Deere 1500 Powertill grain drill that seeds directly into the Bermuda by rotovating a shallow seed bed ahead of the drill.

Since their density of cattle is fairly low, Doug spreads broiler house litter-at $27 per ton delivered-and lime for fertility. He has tried crab and shrimp meal, but it includes too much trash to make it worthwhile.

They graze their herd nearly year-round, rotating them through the fields with the milk cows getting first priority, then the dry cows and heifers. The goats have free access to pasture all the time, but seem to be more affected by inclement weather and go into their shed often. At night, the milk cows are left in the loafing yard next to the milking parlor and their feed is supplemented with a little hay. Doug says this keeps the cows from getting "too loose." Doug cuts his own hay, occasionally buying a little extra from the neighbors.

"Our herd is pretty healthy on the whole because they're out on pasture all the time," says Alyce. Then she adds, "But as they say, if you don't have cows, you don't have problems."

For fly control, they use ducks and a beneficial fly parasite called "muscidifarax zaraptor, Spanglia." The ducks pick through the manure and eat all the eggs and larvae they can find, especially around the edges of the milking parlor between grass and cement. Doug buys the fly parasites from Bozeman BioTech and releases them periodically throughout the year to keep fly populations in check.

Because of the high population of soil-borne parasites and pathogens in their warm environment, they have to worm and vaccinate their cows on a regular program. Still, they've often lost a cow after first frost, and don't know the cause even after having expensive tests run last year.

Recently, Doug and Alyce felt forced to buy 20 more acres across the road to the south. The former owner was spraying chemical pesticides and the drift blew onto their property. Once Doug fences the boundary, he will use this pasture for rotational grazing of their beef cattle, dividing it with moveable electric-tape fence. 

Customers Come To Them 

Besides all their other chores, Alyce and Doug also operate a little cottage store, open 10 am to 5 pm, Wednesday through Saturday, at the front of their property.

When they bought their farm, they planned on selling the cheese through mail-order, so their location at the end of a dirt road didn't seem to be a factor. For a little advertising, Alyce had a publicist friend help her write a press release to send to the local newspapers. Eventually, one paper sent a reporter out and printed an article. Then another did, another and another, until Sweet Home Farm was a regular feature for the print media and television stations from Pensacola to New Orleans.

With the customers coming to them, mail-order sales became superfluous. Most of their customers are retired "snow birds" from the Midwest who come down for the winter, Southerners on vacation, or city people out of Mobile and Pensacola. Alyce catches the travelers by putting out brochures at each of the Welcome Centers to the state. The brochures (10,000 yearly) cost about five cents apiece to print. She had to get them okayed through the Alabama Department of Tour & Travel, who stock them for free.

"I was very reluctant at first to put brochures in the Welcome Centers because I thought it would be too diffuse (of advertising). But it has been a wonderful thing," marvels Alyce.

In addition to cheese, cottage cheese and sour cream butter, they've added a few complimentary items in the store. Alyce makes up nine loaves of bread every night to bake and sell in the morning (nine is how many her oven will hold). They sell homemade pepper jelly, kumquat marmalade, praline syrup, a few vegetables when their large garden overflows, and pecans from the grove behind their cattle shed. They've even added local honey from a neighbor, regional wines, sausage, and crackers because these items go well with the cheese.

They've learned some secrets to retail selling over the years. First and foremost is to readily give away samples of the cheese. They also had to learn presentation. Originally, they put out bulbs of elephant garlic in a bulk basket straight from the garden and charged $4.00 per pound. No one would touch it. So Alyce tried cleaning it, broke it into cloves, and packaged it in net bags. Now it is one of their big sellers at $1.00 per bag ($6.50 per pound).

Operating a retail store on your farm can be an enlightening (and sometimes frightening) experience, finding out just how ignorant the general public has become about their food. Doug tells a story about a couple who came into the store one day and asked why there were cows on the farm. When Doug replied that that's where the cheese came from, they literally backed out of the door without buying anything.

Most customers, though, really like the turkeys that strut around the yard and the chickens in the pen next door. With cattle and their companion egrets grazing at the edge of magnolia trees, and the smell of honeysuckle heavy in the air, Sweet Home Farm presents visitors with a bucolic scene.

Meanwhile, it's milking time again. Alyce and Doug both point out a fat toad behind their water heater, proudly telling me it is death on cockroaches. Then they are off in perpetual motion, creating another day's labor of love.