french | toast

Leslie Cooperband with some of her goats at Prairie Fruits Farm in Champaign. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

Leslie Cooperband’s husband hadn’t even decided to take the job he’d been offered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when a friend called from the road to tell them about a farm with a log house and a “for sale” sign just 10 minutes from campus.

Cooperband and her husband, Wes Jarrell, had been to the area before. Cooperband recalled thinking, “My God, who could possibly live here?”

That phone call came in 2003. Six years later, Jarrell teaches at the university and Cooperband spends most of her time tending the orchards and goats of Prairie Fruits Farm.

“This is really satisfying work, much more so than being a professor. Right now I feel like this is what I want to do for a while…quite a while. And learn how to do this well,” Cooperband said.

Cooperband and her husband are both soil scientists who worked at the University of Wisconsin – Madison before their move to central Illinois. They knew they would need to rehabilitate the land at their new farm, which had previously grown corn and soybeans. “Even though we’re in the heart of the prairie soils here, which are inherently really fertile soils, it was just really beat up from years of corn and soybeans,” Cooperband said.

The first year they planted only one thing: a cover crop of buckwheat. That fall, they composted the used animal bedding and other waste from the Champaign County Fair and spread it in the fields.

In the spring of 2004, Cooperband and Jarrell planted 350 fruit trees and 600 berry plants. Prairie Fruits Farm grows pears, apples, peaches, apricots, cherries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, currants and gooseberries. After three years of transition, the land was certified organic in 2006.

“We knew that we wanted to have fruit, because we both love fruit and my husband grew up on a small fruit farm in Oregon near Portland,” Cooperband said.

Then there are the goats.

Cooperband was intrigued by goats and loved goat cheese, particularly the cheese sold by a small producer at a farmers’ market in Madison. After talking with her, Cooperband started thinking about making her own cheese on a small scale.

“She said, ‘Just get some goats, because if you’ve never raised ‘em, how do you know you’re gonna like ‘em?’” Cooperband said. “So we did.”

After a significant amount of research, the first four Nubian goats arrived at Prairie Fruits Farm in June of 2004, and Cooperband took a five-day cheesemaking course in California shortly thereafter. The three does and one buck were a little over a year old. Cooperband planned to breed them in the fall, so they would kid and start producing milk in the spring.

The long-eared goats, however, had a slightly different plan. Within two weeks of their arrival at the farm, two of the does were pregnant.

“We had them all together and I thought they were not supposed to breed until the days got colder and shorter,” Cooperband said. “But they didn’t read that book.”

The first kid was born shortly after Thanksgiving and the other one followed a few weeks later. Throughout the cold winter, Cooperband would have to go milk the goats on a little wooden milk stand.

“My husband was sure that was gonna be the end of the goat project,” Cooperband said. “But I proved him wrong. I was out there twice a day, milking those girls. We made cheese in the house and shared it with friends and people liked it.”

From there, Cooperband started thinking about selling her cheese commercially. She and Jarrell came up with a business plan and got a loan to make the necessary improvements. The health department had to approve the plan. Cooperband wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before in Illinois: have her own herd, milk the goats and make cheese in a farmstead setting.

“For the health department, it was a new thing,” she said. “We had to spend a small fortune to become licensed and by that point we had to get more goats to be able to justify the expense.”

The facilities and the herd continue to expand. Cooperband estimates she’ll milk between 55 and 60 goats this year.

“It’s turned into the major enterprise that happens here,” she said. “When we came here, we thought we would have fruit and do goats…they would kind of be equal. They’re just such wonderful animals that it’s kind of hard not to have them,” Cooperband said.

Prairie Fruits Farm became a licensed dairy in 2005 and started selling cheese in Urbana. The following year, Cooperband began selling at Chicago’s Green City Market.

Her cheese is also available at the Marion Street Cheese Market in Oak Park. Owner Eric Larson recalled reading about Cooperband’s cheese production in the Chicago Tribune a few months after the market’s opening in late 2004.

“I picked up the phone and called her and we’ve been carrying her cheese ever since,” Larson said. “The actual quality of the cheese is exceptional. She really knows what she’s doing…[with] almost an intuitive or artistic sense.”

Larson, who said Cooperband’s cheeses rival some of the great French cheeses, also appreciates Cooperband’s sustainable approach to farming.

For Cooperband, 48, it’s been a winding road to rural Champaign. She grew up in an urban area near Boston, without any background in agriculture but with an interest in ecology and natural history. After majoring in biology at Barnard College in New York City, she started working as a horticulture intern for the city’s parks department.

“All the parks had been trashed in the 60s and 70s,” she said. “There was a push to clean up the parks and to try to restore the landscape to how [Frederick Law] Olmsted had originally designed it.”

As part of a crew in Brooklyn, Cooperband had several different responsibilities. She got a Class 3 driver’s license and drove dump trucks full of debris to the dump at Coney Island.

After that internship, she inventoried the flora and fauna on parcels of land the Nature Conservancy was considering purchasing. Her duties mostly involved hiking and identifying species.

“That was a really fun job,” Cooperband said.

But it was while working for an ecologist in Costa Rica that she became interested in agriculture.

“The park [in which they were doing research] was really an amazing place, but then I started to become more intrigued by the agriculture that was going around on the outside of the park,” she said. “I started thinking that I needed to know more about agriculture…how could you be focused on plants if you really didn’t know anything about soil?”

She went back to school for ecology but switched into a soil science program, graduating with a doctorate in soil science from Ohio State University in Columbus. She moved to Wisconsin and started working with farmers.

“I always was thinking that I should really learn how to farm because here I was telling all these farmers what to do and I had never really farmed myself,” she said.

Along the way, Cooperband met Jarrell at a scientific conference in Las Vegas.

Now Jarrell teaches full-time at the University of Illinois, where Cooperband also has a part-time position. Her job is flexible enough to allow her to work full-time in the winter but stay on the farm starting in March.

“It’s been kind of a combination of doing some applied research-type projects and doing some adult education,” she said. “Most of the work that I’ve been doing here has been focused around helping communities develop a local food system.”

And that farm, the one her friend called to tell her about?

“We love it here,” Cooperband said. “The sky is unbelievable. You can see storms coming in. You just don’t have that kind of horizon on the coast.”

Nubian and La Mancha goats in the barn at Prairie Fruits Farm Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

A scientific look at Miss Muffet’s curds and whey

It is common knowledge that cheese comes from milk, but the scientific processes that take place during cheesemaking are less well known.

As you might expect the process begins with milk. Leslie Cooperband of Prairie Fruits Farm in downstate Champaign, explained that milk is mostly water, with proteins, fats and milk sugar, which is also known as lactose. To make a solid cheese from the liquid milk, she adds bacteria. These bacteria feast on the lactose, producing lactic acid as a byproduct. This process sours the milk.

The solids still need to thicken into a curdled mass, so Cooperband adds rennet, an enzyme that is naturally produced in the stomachs of young cows, goats and sheep. The rennet helps to curdle the milk.

Once the bacteria and the rennet act on the milk, the solid curds have separated from the liquid whey. (This is what Little Miss Muffet was eating when that dastardly spider sat down beside her.) The more the curds are manipulated, the harder the finished cheese will be.

The cheesemaking procedure depends on the kind of cheese Cooperband is making. For fresh chèvre cheese, she gently ladles the curd into a cheesecloth. Some of the bloomy rind cheeses, which have a white mold rind similar to that found on a brie or a camembert, are made from cut curds. Cooperband cuts the curd into pieces to drain out more of the whey before the curds are ladled.

The bacteria continue to eat lactose and produce acid throughout the process. Once the cheese is properly acidic, the cheese is salted. The salt doesn’t kill the bacteria. It just slows their activity down significantly.

At this point, the fresh cheese could be considered done. Even more microbial activity is involved in making aged cheeses. These cheeses require more than just the lactose-loving bacteria; molds, yeasts and other microorganisms break down the fats and proteins to give aged cheeses more depth and flavor, as well as different textures.

While people can age without doing much work, aging cheeses require maintenance. Cooperband said some of her cheeses must be flipped regularly and others must be washed during the aging process.

“Even the finished cheese is still alive,” she said.

This story originally appeared on the Medill News Service website.