(gentle music) - [Announcer] "A Fork In The Road" was brought to you by, (gentle music) - [Announcer] From produce to people.

The best things are grown and raised in Georgia.

Even in tough times, we come together, work hard, and grow strong.

When you purchase Georgia grown products, you support farmers, families, and this proud State we call home.

Together we will keep Georgia growing.

(gentle music) - [David] Since 1917, the "Farmers and Consumers Market Bulletin" has been Georgia's primary resource for all things, agriculture.

From thousands of classifieds for livestock, farm supplies, equipment, and homegrown goods to the latest and most important farming news, The fascinating and ever changing world of agriculture.

Let's hit the road here in Georgia and meet the farmers, producers, makers, and bakers who keep us all fed, and keep us coming back for more.

Straight ahead, "A Fork In The Road."

(upbeat music) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hand ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ Georgia farmers, artisans, merchant, and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives, through the choices we make in the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting, but the end game remains the same results.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) These milk bottles are familiar to just about everyone who has traversed the isles of any Kroger Dairy in Georgia.

They make their way to the shelves for your personal convenience.

But did you know where that milk is from?

(upbeat music) There's a story here and a fascinating one at that.

And this one begins in Montezuma, Georgia, home of Barrington Dairy and its owner, Pete Gelber.

- We're in Montezuma, Georgia.

And we milk around 12,000 cows.

Kind of a different story.

I'm from the Bronx in New York city.

And my father wanted to keep me out of trouble as a kid.

And he made me go work on a dairy farm in upstate New York.

I went to Cornell, majored in animal science, and now myself and my family own and operate this dairy.

(upbeat music) Cows eat a lot of food.

So we grow corn silage and wheat silage form, and we have about 6,000 total acres.

I always say there's three kinds of cows.

You got the Hilton, you got the motel six, and then you got the cow that has to sleep under the bridge.

So we try to make out cows, give them the Hilton experience.

If you can see behind me, we have these cows, they can walk around.

They can eat whenever they want to, drink whenever they want to.

And they lay in a sand bed, which is the gold standard.

It's like going to the beach.

You lay in the sand, you don't lay in the grass.

They reward us by producing a lot of milk.

Right now this herd right here is averaging over 12 gallons a day, is because they're very comfortable.

(upbeat music) - [David] This is a sophisticated operation.

With more than 6,000 acres, working in harmony with the cows to keep them healthy and happy.

The Barrington team supplies the daily feed.

A healthy concoction for the cows that in turn produces a healthy final product for growing kids and adults alike.

- [Pete] Milk is cheap protein and animal protein is in general superior for young children to grow on, the milk is why they produces the good baby and the strong calf.

And the more milk we feed our calves, the less sickness we have.

- [David] And when you have this many female cows that are milking well, there's babies involved, lots of them and that means the bovine maternity ward here is a really busy place.

(gentle music) - [Pete] Every cow has a baby every year.

So we have our over 12,000 babies get born.

So if you do the math, it goes from anywhere from about 55 to 25 a day.

We have somebody taking care of their maternity ward.

In fact, we have two people there, 24 hours, seven days a week.

A calf that gets off to a good start, ends up having a better life than a calf that gets off to a poor start.

Same as they way it is in humans.

We supply to cows for the baby born at the Georgia Fair, which is just 15 miles down the road.

Being that it's a large farm, it's easy for us to get cows that are going to calve that day.

'Cause we have 30, 40 cows calving a day.

- [David] And this brings us back to the grocery store milk where Barrington Dairy is a big player in filling the shelves both in Georgia, and the entire southeast.

- [Pete] Our milk's gone to Kroger, Publix, Walmart, you name, it goes there.

We sell up about 18% of the milk produced in the state comes from our dairy.

- So now that we better understand the source, let's journey to the incredibly important middleman in this massive Georgia dairy operation.

And for that, we head to Atlanta, to Centennial Farms Dairy.

(upbeat music) Right in the middle of the big city, right off Cheshire bridge road, you'll find Centennial Farms Dairy.

And if you know Atlanta well, it might be the last place you'd expect to find a dairy based operation.

(upbeat music) Ahmed Amin is the safety coordinator at Centennial Farms Dairy and took me on an amazing educational journey through this important high-tech quality control operation.

Where the milk is studied, the bottles are molded, and only the best milk makes it out to the stores.

(upbeat music) - [Ahmed] So we have our raw tanks, which basically is the raw milk that has not been processed.

It's not being pasteurized.

So we will go to the processing area where we do the butterisation and separate the milk from the cream if needed.

- What are you looking for when you're going in here?

- Scan (indistinct) homogenized milk chocolates.

From here and we will input that information on the computer, go from here to the whatever pasteurize tank.

And we'll just watch it until it's finished.

Then we'll get a final check, make sure that we have our butter fats within the required range, and we will release it to the lab, from there, they are release it to the filler operators to put them in the bottles.

- This is the sample bags we have, we get it from the receiving area.

So they put the truck number.

They take a temperature of that, we do our own temperature.

And they bring a paper like this, which is that has the manifest.

And it tells you which company it's coming from, the manifest number, track number, the seal numbers.

(upbeat music) - [David] And it's in these high-tech labs where the quality control takes center stage.

- This is called the somatic cell machine.

When it counts like how many better fat, how many cells is in the milk.

Right here we have the micro room.

This is where we incubate everything.

- [David] So what do you incubate here?

- We get a sample of the milk to make sure nothing is growing on it.

- [David] So no milk goes out until it goes through that incubator thing?

- No milk goes out till we check everything and make sure everything's good and no bacteria or nothing is happening.

This is where we keep the shelf life.

Meaning like, this products is expiring tomorrow.

So from the first moment we made, to the day it's expiring, we check that sample tomorrow, we'll check it to see like, if it's something wrong with it.

If it expired before it was supposed to expire, if it's separated, if the taste is different, we'll do all of that.

We make a data of it and we make assessment based on that.

- [David] And adding to this immense operation is the plastic milk bottle molds, the gallon, the half gallon, the laser printed sell by date, a date which we now know has been scientifically tested.

- They gonna come down here, they gonna go through the climmers.

You see it has the angel wings, flax, and tail.

So, in the process of climmers, we gonna take it off the tail, take the angel off, and it's left.

So you can see the galon.

Also we have leak detector.

It blows the air and see if there is any leak from the bottle.

If it's bad bottle we gonna recycle again.

If the bottle is bad it's gonna drop down here.

(upbeat music) - [David] Centennial also creates the mold and fills the jugs for juices, water, and other tasty beverages sold in local grocery stores.

- We have our distribution team, now is shipping our product, 2025 trailers a day.

- It was truly a comfort seeing all of the science and safety that goes into this dairy.

On the farm, on the assembly line, and in the lab.

Georgia grown milk delivered fresh to both Georgia grocery stores and others craving this classic quality milk all over the south.

Now that we're operating with our glass of milk half full, we journey on down to Thomasville.

Where milk turns to cheese in award winning fashion.

(upbeat music) It's quite a scene watching the sunset over this rolling pasture in Thomasville, Georgia.

These grass fed cows are very friendly, very curious.

And as many happy customers and highly acclaimed chefs will tell you, these cows are very talented.

As well as the folks who look after them and turn their fresh milk into the award-winning handcrafted cheeses of Sweet Grass Dairy.

(gentle music) - [Jessica] We are here in Brooks County, Georgia at one of my parent's three farms, and we make cheese that Sweet Grass Dairy from only my family's farmed milk.

So what makes us so special is that our cows live their entire lives, 365 days a year out on grass.

And it just gives a really unique flavor profile that we think is a little bit different and unique for our industry.

(gentle music) My dad is a fourth generation dairy farmer and he met my mom at the University of Georgia.

And they ended up with degrees in animal science and decided to work on a dairy.

And they farmed at a conventional style.

'Cause dairy farmers are paid on volume.

So how do you make the most amount of milk possible?

So they had 2000 big Holstein cows, the big black and white ones.

And really pushing the cows for maximum production.

And they were winning all kinds of awards.

They started realizing that bigger wasn't necessarily better.

So my dad went to a conference that taught by a New Zealand dairy farmer about rotational grazing.

And he came back and he said to my mom, "Why in the world we live in this area that we can grow grass almost year round."

So in 1993, their first New Zealand rotational grazing style dairy, Sweet Green Dairy was born and the milk was so different that it was my mom's vision to say, "Everybody needs to know where their food comes from, or everybody deserves the right to know where their food comes from."

And so she started making yogurt and butter and ice cream and cheese.

And by far, cheese was the most scientific and artistic at the same time.

And so she settled on cheese.

And we kind of joke that we're the first cheese makers in Georgia.

I don't think that anybody would have said, this was a good idea, but she just knew it.

Like she had to tell people the story.

So my husband and I were living in Atlanta, we were both working in restaurants.

I was starting to take cheese around to chefs and they were saying, "Oh my gosh, we've been waiting for you."

And it wasn't specifically me, it was just somebody making cheese locally.

So by 2005, we had bought the creamery.

And I guess now we'll never leave.

(upbeat music) Each of the farms are at least 350 acres and they are divided up into five acre products.

And so they're milked and then 12 hours, they'll be milked again, and they'll go to a different pasture.

We don't have any barns for our cows.

They do spend all of their lives out here.

But our big challenge is trying to grow grass in the really extreme heat.

And we do this by keeping our cows cool with an irrigation system.

We sit on top of the second largest aquifer in the nation, the Florida and aquifer.

But the goal here is that the cows are going to eat the most nutritious part of the grass.

So you don't want them to graze too close to the ground where they might compact the soil too much, or have potential parasite problems, or you don't want the grass to grow too tall, where it might seed out and be too fibrous.

You really want that most nutritious part.

Crimson clover and Kelpies, rye grass and oats in the winter.

And then we're getting summer clover, bermuda and crab grass in the summer.

So the diversity of grasses, along with the organic matter that is being built every single year, leads to more diversity and more microbiological life in the soil, which turns into more flavor in the milk and ultimately in cheese.

(upbeat music) - [David] So Sweet Grass became the first cheese makers in Georgia.

And they certainly haven't slowed down their progress.

They recently cut the ribbon on a new 12,500 square foot facility, which will triple its production capacity.

Jeremy knows just about everything about cheese and cheese making, and took me around the new facility where I learned so much about how their cheese is made in the way they create these amazing varieties.

(upbeat music) - This is the most exciting part for me moving forward, because we have so much more control, so much new control in here.

We got Marcos over here.

Marcos and Eric are the two milk guys that we've got.

This panel that you see here is the control panel for our HTST.

Which stands for High Temperature Short Time pasteurizer.

And what it allows us to do, is detreat and pasteurize the milk in a much more gentle fashion.

Once the HTST gets moving, the milk is only heated up and cooled down for a period of about 15 to 20 seconds.

We're seeing better flavor development.

We're seeing a better yields.

It's just a better way to do what we were doing anyway, but in a new facility.

(upbeat music) So these cheeses were made yesterday.

This is Green Hill, we've got seven stacks.

Carlos is pulling the cheeses out of the brawn right now as you see, cheeses get brawn for around 30 minutes, these guys were made yesterday.

Yesterday we did roughly 2200 cheeses, something like that.

So here's the milk that's coming over, that we just saw Marcos programming into the HTST.

New cheese VAT, I love how quiet it is.

In the other facility, this was one of the louder noises that you heard in the production room.

And over here, it's got this kind of serenity to it, which is very unusual.

The way it's designed, it's very, very safe.

But it's also very, very cheese friendly.

- [David] They even look like little pieces of Swiss cheese.

- [Jeremy] Yeah.

Anything that happens to the milk will happen right here.

So the culture gets added.

The curd will be created from the coagulant and then the paddles will stir to manipulate the texture, whatever it is that we're looking for.

And then once it's ready to go, the pump gets hooked up to the big valve, and then it gets transferred over to this guy that you see behind us.

So this is called the curd shoot.

It fills up, and then it basically falls over the waterfalls here.

This guy gets pushed all the way through the curd sheet like this, and then comes out the other side, the curd distributor comes off, and then it rotates to the table that's coming on behind it.

These guys will get stacked together and then it looks like this.

So this is a flavored cheese that we made called Cyprus.

But basically the stack turner allows us to flip all the cheeses as a group and not individually, like we used to have to do.

There's 50 cheeses right there.

Sean just flipped them all as you saw in a couple seconds.

Here's the salting room.

This is kind of the transitional space.

What Pat's doing right now, Pats vacuum sealing tome for pimento cheese.

These cheeses have already been salted on both sides.

The salt that goes on the outside, it helps to propagate rind development.

So the salt gets put on the outside, the salt pulls moisture out of the wheel itself.

And that moisture that is brought to the surface is actually food for the organisms that propagate the rind.

So we get that process started and then this room is actually less humid, and it's also warmer temperature wise.

This is another thing that we put a whole bunch of investment into, the aging space.

The cheeses as you can see the rind development is pretty awesomely consistent, which is a good indication of the conditions in this room being very stable.

- [David] It's been going for a month.

- [Jeremy] Yeah.

This is a month old, you can see.

So this is a good, kind of a good showing of rind development.

But you can see that's got some blue mold on here and some of the white mold is penicillium candida or penicillium album depending on what we're looking at here.

But that's really what's happening during aging is that you've got all these organisms that are still living inside of the wheels as they are.

And that's what causes the different textural changes, and then also the flavor development.

So this is Griffin.

We use a beer from Georgia Terminus Porter, which is from Gate City Brewing.

- [David] And I saw the keg of Gate City, I thought you were just having a party.

- No.

A full keg gets added to every batch.

(upbeat music) You saw the Green Hills that were being brought in this morning.

And then these are the youngest cheeses.

These are two days old, they've been in here.

So they they'd been flipped once, the plastic mats have been removed and they've been flipped over, you can kind of see the chronology here.

So this is the batch from two days prior, you can start to see that some of the penicillium is starting to grow.

Here's another two days.

So the difference between this batch here and then this guy here, is two days.

Come across the hallway here and this is two more days.

This was made on the 12th.

These were made on the sixth.

So in six days time, you go from what looks to be consistency of like a stick of butter, over to a nice, fairly well-developed boom rounds.

They are looking nice now.

(gentle music) - [David] Thomasville is their home and is a town with a thriving Downtown District.

And it's fair to say, the littles have made it even better.

(upbeat music) - Hi Jessica, tell me where we are, this is gorgeous.

- So this is our tea shop located in Downtown Thomasville.

And we opened this in 2010, because we wanted to get more involved in the community and offer the Sweet Grass Dairy experience.

- [David] Yeah.

And it's a healthy Downtown and this cheese shop and bar really adds to it.

- [Jessica] That's our goal for sure.

- [David] Well, this is a cheese shop, - [Jessica] Yes.

- [David] Cheeses is what you do.

- [Jessica] Yes.

- [David] But there's other things you can get here.

- [Jessica] That is true.

So our number one selling thing of course is cheese, but we really wanted to create a very approachable, a place where you could come and bring your significant other for date night or bring your family and feel really comfortable.

So we do fried cheese curds, our most popular item behind the cheese boards is a pimento cheese bourbon bacon jam burger.

So we do lots of cheeseburgers and salads and sandwiches.

So just very approachable but delicious foods from like-minded producers.

- Well, let's discuss what we have in front.

I think I could take this all down about 10 minutes, but I need to just enjoy it, right?

- [Jessica] That's right, we're gonna savoir it.

So I'll walk you through some of our cheeses here.

This is our Green Hill, named after our flagship dairy.

Is the very first one that my parents started.

That was the New Zealand rotational grazing style.

And so Jeremy wanted to make a cheese that was kind of, that encaptured what makes our milk so special.

So it's a double cream, cow's milk, with a white bloomy rind.

It's in the family of a Brie.

So you can get that mushroomy, fresh cream, grassy flavor profile.

And we paired it here with blackberry patches, peach bourbon cardamone jam.

So we've worked with them to come up with some really great jam flavors that would pair perfectly with cheeses.

And this was one of my favorites.

I love these two together.

- David] I'm sure it's good on its own, but everything's better with a little jam.

- It really is.

(gentle music) - Oh, good mix.

- Yeah.

So it kind of the sweetness and the salty, creamy, all of those together.

- [David] I love it.

And this is this the one you brought to the chefs back in the day and they said, "We love this."

- Yes.

Well, I think again, it's just a good vehicle for our very unique milk and it is the one that we've won the most awards for.

So it's really helped put Sweet Grass Dairy on the map on a national scale.

- I love it.

The good news is I'm not full.

- Good.

Good.

- So we can do a little more here.

(gentle music) - [Jessica] So this is our Thomasville Tomme.

This is our almost to our hometown.

And Tomme is a style that refers to, kind of a French everyday table cheese.

It's farmers cheese, it's very approachable.

Making cheese, being the first ones in Georgia.

We don't have a long history of cheesemaking here.

So a big part of what Sweet Grass Dairy does is just education and telling people the story of what is artisan cheese.

- Okay.

Do I dip it in anything?

- Well you can, if you want to.

Again it's a delicious with a wide range of jams.

I like it also with charcuterie.

I think it goes really well with salamis, prosciuttos, and I've got this awesome smoked duck breast right here, that I think the smokiness and the flavor of the cheese are just perfect together.

- Oh, that's exciting.

It's great on its own.

Now I'm going to have it with smoked duck breasts.

- There you go.

- Which yeah.

Yeah.

That's a new one for me.

(gentle music) - So?

- When did you get that?

- So this is from New Skis.

So this is a small producer in Wisconsin.

We like to say that whether you come into the cheese shop, we can give you an experience of connecting with whoever you're with or an exploration if you're curious about other foods.

So we want you to be able to leave with more knowledge than you walked in the door with.

- I'm already getting a lot.

And I think it's neat.

I'm having Mike meat from Wisconsin, but my cheese from Georgia, right?

- Yes.

- That is perfect.

Okay.

Let's keep going.

- Okay.

So this is our pimento cheese.

So what makes our pimento so special is a couple of things.

One, we use Thomasville Tomme as the base.

So most people that make pimento cheese are dips and spreads companies that make a lot of dips and spreads.

There's very few cheese makers first that make up pimento cheese.

And it's funny because in the south, we all kind of grew up with pimento cheese, but outside of the south, pimento cheese is having a moment.

It's so popular.

So this is our fastest growing skew.

I didn't think that there was going to be demand outside.

We just started making it for the cheese shop.

And then we slowly had more and more customers asking us for our pimento cheese.

So it's the only realm pimento cheese that we know of on the market.

Cheese is equally artistic and scientific at the same time, changes of culture and changes of technique can have widespread changes in texture and flavor.

- Well, you also have this here.

- Yes.

- So cheers.

- Cheers.

- Thank you for visiting.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I'm going to leave with this.

(upbeat music) So from a giant milking operation in Montezuma where thousands of hardworking cows are producing this nutritious, Georgia born product, to a downtown Atlanta dairy facility, where milk is carefully inspected, bottled, and shipped to the shelves.

And the State's first cheese makers located down south in Thomasville, where these grass fed cows do their best to help this couple keep raking in the awards and making great cheese for everyone to enjoy.

A wide range of dairy products from hardworking Georgia farmers, scientists, and cheese mongers.

I'm David Del Zelski, see you at the next, "Fork In The Road," (upbeat music) - [Announcer] "A Fork In The Road" was brought to you by, (upbeat music) - [Announcer] From produce to people.

The best things are grown and raised in Georgia.

Even in tough times, we come together, work hard, and grow strong.

When you purchase Georgia grown products, you support farmers, families, and this proud State we call home.

Together we will keep Georgia growing.

- [Announcer] Georgia FSIS provides efficient and accurate third-party inspection services to members of the industry.

We inspect berries fresh commodities, including peanuts, fruits, vegetables, and pecans.

The use of the inspection service ensures the shipment of high quality products and enhances Georgia's reputation as a supplier of superior agricultural products.