Why Academics Turned to Goat Farming at Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery

Illinois is known for many things: corn, soybeans, and pigs. Cheese and other dairy products are not one of them. But Leslie Cooperband and her husband Wes Jarrell didn’t let that stop them from opening Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, the first licensed dairy with an on-farm creamery in the state in 2003. Today the farm is also coming full circle with Cooperband’s own research on silvopastoral grazing, a process of integrating farm animals and trees on the same land. Cooperband summed it up, “I had a science background already and it lends itself very well to becoming a cheesemaker.”

 

From Academia to Agriculture

The path to Prairie Fruits started in academia for both Cooperband and Jarrell. They both started as soil science professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; in fact, Cooperband was the first female professor of soil science at the school.

But it was her encounter with French style cheeses at the Dane County Madison Farmers Market that got her interested in cheesemaking. She explained, “I became a fan of a very small micro goat dairy farmstead creamery called Fantome Farms. Anne Topham was one of the pioneers of bringing French style goat cheeses to the United States back in the early 80s.” Cooperband wanted to understand how to make cheeses like hers.

When her husband was offered a job as head of the Natural Resources and Environmental Science department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, they decided to buy the property that would become Prairie Fruits Farms in 2003. “It had been in cash grain agriculture for over 100 years and we wanted to convert it all into perennial agriculture,” Cooperband said. In 2004, they planted an orchard and got four goats, three does and a buck. She explained that it was “just to see how that felt, and to experiment with having a small amount of milk and making cheese in the house.”

Things escalated pretty quickly, Cooperband said. “It was pretty clear that we wanted to have a saleable product and in order to have a saleable product, we had to really jump the gun and put in a facility that we would legally be able to sell our goat cheese.” In 2005, Prairie Fruits became licensed by the state. For four years, Cooperband worked half-time teaching at the university and growing the herd and running the farm, until she stepped away from academia to focus on Prairie Fruits fulltime.

 

What is Silvopasture?

Making the farm sustainable was never in question since Cooperband and Jarrell had already focused on soil as professors. “Now as farmers, [we wanted] to build system farming systems that are truly sustainable and even beyond sustainable,” Cooperband said, “and at the same time, [we wanted to] create an environment for the goats to be able to express their natural behaviors, which is what animal welfare approved is all about.”

Cooperband is putting words into action by implementing silvopasture at the farm since it had been the topic of her Ph.D. in the 1980s. She had spent time in Costa Rica studying silvopasture and cattle. “It’s kind of come full circle,” she said. Wondering what is silvopasture? The United States Department of Agriculture defines silvopasture as “the deliberate integration of trees and grazing livestock operations on the same land. These systems are intensively managed for both forest products and forage, providing both short- and long-term income sources.”

Cooperband explains that the idea of using trees so the goats can forage works well because “It provides really high nutrition but also improves just the quality of their existence.” It’s also listed as one of the top ten climate mitigating strategies in agriculture because both the trees and pasture store carbon above and below ground.

Silvopasture has been so successful that they try to spread the word, especially with their wholesale customers. However, along with other sustainable farmers have noticed a general waning of interest in sustainable practices. For wholesalers, the biggest carbon emitters are the farms and the transportation of the product to stores. “We were kind of offering ourselves up as an opportunity for them to essentially get carbon credits by supporting us, and by having their stores use our cheese as much as possible,” but the bottom line holds greater interest.

Since they’ve opened their farm and creamery, they have not seen a boom in dairy and cheesemaking in Illinois. While there are a few farms that produce milk and yogurt or a creamery that makes cheese, twenty years later, according to Cooperband, they are the only farmstead goat cheesemaking facility.

Cooperband explains, “This farming community is very much a row crop mindset kind of community. And they used to have animals and they were very happy to get rid of their animals.” If they have livestock, it’s cattle, pigs, or chickens because dairy farms are a lifestyle. You have to milk the animals twice a day, seven days a week, which is a huge commitment.

 

Why Goats are the Greatest (of all time)

When asked why they chose to work with goats, Cooperband says, “they’re very much on a human scale, they’re very much on a woman scale.” She notes that many of their workers have been women, both in the past and currently. As for the goats, she said they are super engaging, curious, affectionate, and their milk is “beautiful for making cheese.” Ultimately, it’s easy to have an intimate relationship with them. Currently, they have 90 total goats with 80 goats providing milk and three breeding bucks. Since 2010 they have been Animal Welfare Approved. Read more about animal welfare certifications.

After getting certified as a dairy in 2005, their first commercial cheese was fresh chevre, which has since won several awards. “It is really the bellwether of our pasture based milk and the seasonality of our milk,” she said. In the second year, they experimented with blooming rind cheeses and raw milk tommes.

 

Award-Winning Goat Cheese

Since then, they’ve made a variety of award-winning cheeses. The Black Goat is a typical French style bloomy-rind cheese where they use charcoal ash to neutralize the acidity on the rind. It’s a high moisture curd and ripens quickly, Cooperband said.

Another one of their better known and award-winning cheeses is the Fleur de la Prairie. It’s also a bloomy rind like the Black Goat but instead of charcoal ash, they cover it with herbs and edible flowers. They source the herbs from their own herb and flower garden as well as getting edible flowers from a nearby flower farm.

Cooperband noted, “We dehydrate the flowers and herbs and decorate the rind just before it’s wrapped. So the herbs and flowers don’t necessarily impart much flavor except like when you cut into it and bite it then they’ll taste that,” but using ash or not using ash on the cheese “has a dramatic effect on how the cheese ripens and the flavor profile of the cheese.”

Their goat and mixed milk cheeses are available through their Prairie Fruits website, of course, as well as several towns and cities in Illinois.

 

Getting People on the Farm through Agritourism

In addition to their cheese offerings, Prairie Fruits participates in agritourism, offering visitors opportunities to meet the goats, go on tours, and of course, buy cheese and other products. Cooperband calls it an integral part of their business, both for financial reasons and educational opportunities. They aim to educate people about the differences between homestead goat cheese and industrially made goat cheese.

“We insert what we call stealth education. highlighting that what you’re seeing is not typical of what commercial dairies look like throughout the United States and letting people know that our milk is incredible for this reason and our cheeses and gelato are incredible for this reason,” she explained. People can interact with the goats, which as Cooperband said are engaging and charismatic animals. (They also sell goats).

They just restarted farm to table dinners, where they would bring together locally grown foods to make incredible meals. They had paused them during the pandemic but they will be doing an event with Chef Stephanie Izard in August. “It’s a great opportunity to surprise people that there are farms that are growing amazing vegetables, fruits, and we would highlight all these other farms as well as our own,” she said.

Ultimately, Cooperband hopes “there are people out there that want to continue to do this type of dairy farming and are committed to making sure that farms of our scale and our mission will continue to exist in some fashion.”