The Rural Voice, 2004-08, Page 30r
Full Line Custom Farm Services
Planting all crops: no -till and conventional
Field tillage: conservation and conventional
Spraying and fertilizing
Mowing alfalfa
Large square baling with up to 49 knives
Harvesting: alfalfa, corn silage and cob meal
Direct cut cereal silage and high -moisture corn
Silage hauling and bunker packing
Combining all crops
Claussen Farms Custom Farming Inc.
76402 Airport Line, Brucefield, ON NOM 1)0
Sonke: 1-519-233-3198 or 1-519-525-8329
Hauke: 1-519-233-7265 or 1-519-525-7733
E-mail: claussen@tcc.on.ca
claussenfarms.co
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26 THE RURAL VOICE
material before UV treatment,
producing water purer than a system
using chlorination, he says.
The air pressure is higher within
the plant than outside which means
that no matter if there is dust outside
from farming operation or smells
from his own farm or from
neighbours, they won't seep into the
plant.
Wastes from the plant and milk -
house are treated in a five -stage
process, including settling tanks,
digesters and aeration tanks and
microbiotic action nibblers. The
water leaving the last stage is almost
as clean as the water from the well.
he says.
It's one thing to make cheese and
another to sell it. "It's not as simple
as 'If you build it they will come',"
he says.
With
no marketing
infrastructure in place, the
easiest market to serve was
the food services industry, marketing
directly to restaurants.
To add the most value to his milk,
he felt he needed to bypass hard
cheeses where there are cheaper
cow's milk equivalents, and
concentrate on cheeses made only
from goat's milk. Soft, spreadable
chevre makes up 90 per cent of the
plant's cheese production. Most of it
is sold in large tubs to high-end
restaurants in Toronto, Stratford and
Niagara -On -The -Lake. (They also
sell some product to Boston, New
York and California.)
The difficulty with this easy -to -
serve market became obvious when
the SARS outbreak scared off
American tourists. When added to
the fear of travel after the Gulf War
and the BSE scare, business plunged
at the restaurants leaving him with
surplus milk.
"We decided we can't have all our
eggs in one basket," he says, so be
began exploring the retail market.
This was helped out by the fact that
some of the high end restaurants
were already branding C'estbon
cheese as an ingredient used in their
dishes, creating questions from
diners as to where they could
purchase the cheese. Packaging was
changed to provide the small
containers retail customers would
want and new markets were
developed. A real coup, he says, was