The Complete Patient

On two acres in Rosanky, Texas, just outside of Austin, Debbie and Red Ferrell milk 30 goats to produce their fresh Maid in the Shade cheese. They’ve been at it for two-and-a-half years, and the $300 to $500 they bring in each week is an essential supplement to Red’s $1,600 monthly disability, to support themselves and their two young children. 

But the couple has been out of business for the last two weeks, since two inspectors from the Texas Manufactured Food Division of the state’s Department of State Health Services showed up at an Austin farmer’s market and, after much argument with the Ferrells, confiscated $300 worth of the couple’s cheese.

The problem? Debbie says she was told an inspector determined she wasn’t heating her milk hot enough to be certain it was pasteurized.

Red objected to the inspectors taking the cheese for testing without having proper coolers to preserve it over a hot weekend; he didn’t want their tests to show spoilage that wasn’t his doing. So the inspectors took the cheese and destroyed it.

Two weeks before the seizure, an inspector came by their farmhouse to look over Debbie’s kitchen, where she produces the cheese. She thinks the inspector wrote down that she heats the milk in her double boiler to 140 degrees for half an hour, rather than the 145 degrees that is required, and that she conforms to. “I think he wrote down 140 degrees when I told him I often keep it at 150 degrees for thirty minutes,” she told me.

I spoke with a couple of officials of the Texas Manufactured Food Division, but they wouldn’t discuss the Ferrell’s situation, saying the matter was still “under investigation.”

To get back in business, Debbie and Red now need to purchase approved pasteurizing equipment, which they say runs $14,000 to $20,000, although they are investigating a contraption that may run “only” $4,000, and still pass muster.

Whatever the final price, it will be a huge burden—perhaps an impossible burden—for an operation that brings in $20,000 to $25,000 annually. In other words, Debbie and Red may be pushed out of business.

And they say they aren’t alone. They say they know of about 40 or so other small cheesemakers like themselves around Texas who use double boilers, water baths, and other such ordinary utensils to pasteurize their milk. (One of the officials of the Texas Manufactured Food Division tells me the agency inspects 15 small cheese makers.)

“They’ve all gone to ground” since her farm’s shutdown, says Debbie. “It’s going to put a lot of us small producers out of business.”

Cheesemaking has grown dramatically in the last 25 years. The American Cheese Society’s annual cheese competition in Vermont had more than 1,200 entries this year, versus 665 in 2004, according to an article in the November-December print issue of The American magazine (not available online).

So there are a lot of people like the Ferrells around the country, scratching out a living by making fresh cheese from milk they pasteurize themselves, and then selling the produce at farmers markets. On the side of the regulators, people do get sick from bad cheese, but that tends to be cheese made from raw milk and brought into the U.S. from Mexico. No one was able to cite recent cases of illness in Texas. Seems like the Ferrells are paying quite a high price for a questionable amount of public "protection."