Tucked off Highway 101 is a portal to another time. Here at Schoch Family Farmstead, there’s a rhythm that remains the same day after day, year after year and generation after generation, even as the outside world changes: The cows must be milked. And they have been, every day, twice a day, since 1944 – in the same milking barn.
It all began in the 1920s when brothers Adolph and Ernest Schoch emigrated from Switzerland, bought property just north of Salinas, where the flat and fertile land begins to turn to rolling hills, and established a dairy. Today, John Schoch and his three sons – Seth (who manages the herd), Beau (who makes cheese) and Ty (who ages, packages and sells the cheese, yogurt and raw milk) – run the farmstead, second – and third-generation farmers doing something increasingly rare.
“I feel like everything’s changing around us,” Beau says, looking out across the land he grew up on, where these days the Schoch family grazes about 100 cows on 100 acres (plus some of their neighbors’ land). It’s a tiny scale in the world of modern dairy farming, where the average California herd is 1,000 animals.
But things are evolving at Schoch, too. While most of the milk is sold directly to the commodities market, about 15 percent is held back for branded products.
In 2006 Beau started making cheese “just for fun,” and in 2012 the family built a creamery inside an old tractor shed. On the outside it looks, well, like a tractor shed from the 1940s. But inside it’s all modern machines and gleaming basins. Milk, still warm from the cow, is piped over from the milking barn next door to be bottled and sold raw under the Schoch label, or directed toward yogurt or, on Tuesdays, cheese making.
After the curds and whey are separated, and the cheese pressed into rounds, the process moves to a cold, fragrant cheese cave where the rounds float in a brine for a few days before being placed on shelves to age. The “refrigeration” in this room is natural – the temperatures on the property drop to the low 50s every night as cool ocean breezes make their way inward from the Monterey Bay. This cool air is pumped into the cheese cave (through HEPA filters), keeping it cool all day long. “We have this perfect little environment,” Beau says. “It’s kind of like we were meant to be here.” The cheeses stay in this happy environment, developing a natural rind, for anywhere between two months and several years.
Beau currently makes six different hard cheeses, including East of Edam, a Salinas twist on the Dutch classic, Mt. Toro Tomme and the only Monterey Jack produced in Monterey County. The history of Monterey Jack is a little convoluted – there are at least three competing narratives for who first made the ubiquitous cheese – but the story then seems to go that area businessman and landowner David Jacks ran with the idea, marketing it in San Francisco where it became known as “Jacks’ cheese from Monterey” and, eventually, “Monterey Jack.”
Schoch’s version is like a backyard chicken egg compared to one from an industrial farm – beyond the signature creamy base, it offers a sharper, more complex, tang. “It’s more like, maybe, the original,” Beau says. The farmstead yogurt is rich and delicious – especially the Greek-style yogurt which is thickened by hanging in cheesecloth bags. And the raw milk is over 4-percent fat (typical whole milk is around 3.5 percent) and arrives to local markets just hours after milking.
All this is indicative of the direction Beau sees Schoch going. “I think the future for us is value-added stuff,” he says. The goal, he thinks, would be to milk fewer cows and direct more of that milk – all, if possible – to cheese, yogurt and raw milk. The family is also building out a small farmstead shop, and contemplating the possibility of offering farm tours – allowing people to connect with the land, animals and people that make our food.
“Being one of the last dairies around – we’ve got something kind of unique now,” Beau says.