There are two very different – but equally true – stories of how Jean Morin became one of the country’s most acclaimed cheese-makers.
One tells how the Québec dairy farmer cautiously laid the foundation for Fromagerie du Presbytère over a period of many years by consulting with experts, taking workshops and travelling, and meticulously attending to the smallest details of milk, and later cheese, production. The other is the tale of a man who – when seized by a vision – took a leap into the unknown, trusting he would find a way to overcome any obstacle in his path.
The first such vision came 26 years ago, and prompted Morin and his brother Dominique to abruptly stop using chemical sprays and fertilizers on their farm near Sainte-Élizabeth de Warwick, a two-hour drive northeast of Montréal.
“I went organic because of a personal philosophy and because of concern about using so many pesticides,” says the 53-year-old, fourth-generation farmer. “Of course, this brought on many technical challenges and also the challenge of being economically viable.”
That’s one way to put it. Many figured the two young brothers were on the road to ruin.
“Did they talk about this crazy farmer?” Morin says with a laugh. “Oh yes, when we started there were many discussions about organic production around here.”
It would be a decade before an organic milk pool was started and the Morins began receiving a premium for their milk. In the meantime, they had to deal with all those ‘technical’ issues on Ferme Louis d’Or (a name bestowed by their grandfather Louis).
But this was just the sort of challenge that appealed to Morin’s meticulous side. His brother manages the 85 dairy cows, so he concentrated on the land base, which today consists of 600 acres of forage, grains, oilseeds and pasture. The biggest challenge in going organic – and this is still true today – is weed control. Because his land is hilly and subject to erosion, hitching a conventional plow to his tractor wasn’t going to be a solution.
So Morin turned to others, seeking information and advice wherever he could find it and, in the process, becoming a life-long learner. He consulted other organic growers as well as researchers, and attended workshops. When he discovered that European equipment makers had machines suited for his type of production, he undertook more research and began importing implements from across the Atlantic. His first purchase was a cultivator from Germany designed for weed control on organic farms and he is currently testing (along with experts from the local junior college, Cégep de Victoriaville) a Danish field weeder that he hopes will give him the upper hand over his most bitter foe, fast-spreading and horribly invasive crouch grass.
“Gathering information and ideas, and taking training so you can put those ideas into practice is key,” says Morin. “In organic production, it is a series of small elements that can make or break you, and determine your success. This is why in organic agriculture, a bad manager is very bad.”
But his fixation on these ‘small elements’ also gave rise to Morin’s second vision. On a trip to the Jura region of Switzerland in 1992, he visited several cheese-makers who were using raw milk.
“I was very interested in the process,” he says. “I thought it was wonderful and I thought the cheeses were the best I had ever tasted.
“I decided I wanted to keep my milk in a natural state and take advantage of the flavour and tastes that come along with that, and to preserve these different strains of lactobacilli that add to the flavour and aroma.”
As with his move to organic, the details and the dream were two sides of the same coin. In pasteurization, milk is heated to a high temperature for a brief period of time, which kills harmful bacteria such as listeria, E. coli, and salmonella, but also ‘friendly’ ones such as lactobacilli. So raw-milk cheese-makers must master other techniques to make their product safe, including the art of aging cheeses and feeding cattle on ‘dry’ hay (silage can increase levels of bad bacteria).
As he did when learning about organic agriculture, Morin attended workshops and built a network of advisors and experts to learn about everything from making quality raw-milk cheeses to how to meet Canada’s much more stringent regulations governing this type of cheese-making. And as with his battle against weeds, it is a never-ending process. This year, he has 15 different test plots of hay and he says each year there are times “when we are ripping our hair out because as the seasons change, the pastures change and that affects the milk, both its protein content and flavour.”
It was this type of research that set the stage for Morin’s third – and most ambitious – vision.
In 2005, an abandoned church rectory across the road from his farm came up for sale. As he stood gazing at the historic presbytère, a picture came into his mind. He could see the two-storey brick building lovingly restored as a cheese shop, with customers admiring the stately grounds when they came to buy cheese. He could envision a new plant in the rear of the property, ready to turn his organic milk into the kind of top-quality Swiss raw-milk cheeses he had tasted all those years earlier.
At that moment, Fromagerie du Presbytère was born.
“Yes, I had a vision and this was extremely important,” says Morin. “Sometimes opportunities come up quickly and you must be ready to seize them. We had already begun to prepare our herd for this type of production by moving them to dry hay and also at this time, equipment and cheese moulds from another facility had come up for sale.”
To say Fromagerie du Presbytère (fromageriedupresbytere.com) has been successful would be an understatement. It has sales of $1.6 million (two and one-half times that of the dairy), and they would be higher if Morin had more cheese to sell. Already famous in Québec for winning top prizes for its cheese three times in a row, it blew away the competition at the biannual Canadian Cheese Grand Prix in 2011, winning champion awards in three categories and walking away with the overall grand championship for its Louis d’Or cheese. Morin now gets orders from across North America, and sells all he can produce.
His success stems both from his big dreams and his attention to the smallest production details, he says.
“You must surround yourself with experts and knowledge, and you have to be able to separate what works in theory and what works in practice,” he says. “Of course, the other side of this is that you also have to be creative. It is hard to be innovative if you are afraid of making mistakes. Of course, you will make mistakes, but it will not be the end of the world.”
Although this blend of the technical and the creative may seem odd, Morin says both spring from the same source – a desire to produce the best milk he can.
“Above all, you must have a passion for what you are doing – if you don’t have that, then you won’t get anywhere.”