UW Spooner Agricultural Research
Believe it or not, Wisconsin is the Silicon Valley of sheep cheese.
Or at least we were. An entire fledgling industry will pay the price for cuts in state aid to the University of Wisconsin. On Jan. 5, the UW’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences announced plans to close its dairy sheep research program later this year. It’s housed at the Spooner Agricultural Research Station in northern Wisconsin. The UW estimates resulting savings of $150,000 annually.
Spooner is the only dairy sheep research program in North America, and dairy sheep producers look to the station for research results, sheep milk and breeding stock.
Last year more than 200 of the station’s sheep were sold to producers across the United States as well as Wisconsin.
“Maybe immediately the loss of the milk supply is important, but the real loss to the industry in Wisconsin — and really the United States and Canada — is the research output, and the outreach that comes out of that station,” says David Thomas, professor of sheep management and genetics at UW-Madison.
The 388-acre Spooner station, established in 1909, is one of 12 UW-Madison agricultural research stations statewide. Sheep were added to its research program in 1936; its dairy sheep research and outreach program was started by Thomas and Yves Berger, emeritus station superintendent, in 1993.
A main focus of the sheep program, according to the station’s website, is the genetic improvement of dairy sheep and production of sheep milk for processing into cheese.
The station’s work on dairy sheep has been hugely important to cheese producers such as Bob Wills, master cheesemaker and owner of Cedar Grove Cheese in Plain and Clock Shadow Creamery in Milwaukee. His award-winning cheeses are distributed nationally.
Obtaining sheep milk is “not just a matter of throwing some sheep on a farm and milking them and expecting it’s going to be good for the dairy industry,” he says.
“When we started out, we didn’t realize the different impact of sheep breeds on the flavor of the cheese, and yields. Or that some [breeds] are healthier and work better in our climate. That’s where the research that was going on was very helpful, because it was allowing continual improvement.”
Wills now worries that such improvements will have to be figured out “farm by farm and factory by factory.” Or, he adds, farmers might need to travel to Europe “and learn what we can from them and bring it home.”
In the last few decades, sheep milk cheese has become increasingly popular, including among those who have allergies to conventional dairy. Besides Pecorino Romano, Manchego and true Roquefort, there are more than 70 kinds of sheep milk cheese, including Wensleydale — arguably most famous as a punch line in Monty Python’s “cheese shop” sketch.
America is the world’s largest consumer of sheep cheese. To feed that need, it has to import 60 to 70 million pounds a year. Meanwhile, the popularity of domestic sheep milk cheese has been growing.
Despite this economic opportunity, “there are probably less than 200 sheep dairy farms in the entire United States,” says Thomas. “Those farms maybe produce five million pounds of sheep’s milk a year. That would [only] be enough to make a million pounds of sheep milk cheese.”
The Spooner research station has helped out on this end, providing around 200,000 pounds of sheep milk annually for state cheesemakers.
The station’s flock of around 300 ewes are expected to be sold this fall.
The loss of that milk production “can be made up in time with expansion among the 20 or so [other sheep] dairies in the state,” says Thomas. But it will be harder to compensate for the loss of the research arm, he adds.
“I would like to hope that it could come back, but I’m very doubtful.”