Sterling Bridge Dairy Farm, LLC

Makers of Fresh Goat Cheeses and Aged Jersey Cow's Milk Cheeses

Our Cheese	Sterling Bridge Dairy Farm produces a variety of aged and fresh cow and goat cheeses. Our cheeses have superior flavor and texture due to the high quality milk that we produce on our farm. Our milk is superior because our Jersey cows and dairy goats are grazed on lush open pastures during the cheese making season that runs from April through November. By keeping our own dairy livestock, we can produce superior quality milk that is fresher than anything used by large commercial cheese plants. Due to State of VA regulations, farmstead cheese plants must process their milk into cheese twice per week, while milk at commercial cheese plants could be as much as a week old before it goes in the vat. The fresher the milk, the better the cheese.
Sustainability	Sterling Bridge Dairy Farm is working towards becoming a sustainable farming enterprise. This means we seek to work with rather than against the natural order. During the grazing season, our livestock derive most of their nutritional requirements from the pasture plants they graze on. Pasture that has not been treated with any synthetic products during the past ten years. Further, studies in Ireland have shown that grass fed dairy cows produce higher quality milk than cows fed silage and grain in confinement. That high quality milk in turn produces superior quality cheeses.
Producing Compost	Rather than using synthetic chemicals on our land, we compost our manure during the winter months (December-March) in the barn and the cattle shed. New bedding, in the form of wood chips or waste hay, from local sources (both on and off farm,) is placed over the manure as needed to produce a compost heap that is relatively clean and provides a great deal of heat during the cold winter nights, heat that keeps those goats warm! In the spring, the rotted bedding is hauled to the pastures and spread with a manure spreader to enrich the soil.
Enriching the Soil	In addition to composted manure we add lime and wood ash (source of pot ash and phosphors) to the soil to correct soil imbalances. The source of lime is crushed and pelletized limestone and is used to correct soil ph. Wood ash is produced by burning firewood cut on or near our farm. The firewood is use to heat our cheese plant/milk room and milking parlor and the pasteurizers / cheese vats used for making our cheeses. Producing heat with wood is the first step to energy independence, an important part of sustainable agriculture.
Grass Farming	By utilizing grass as our primary source of feed, we have eliminated the need for large amounts of commercially grown feed stuffs. Floyd County, Virginia is an ideal place for a grazing operation. Due to the topography, it is very difficult to produce corn and soybeans, the typical feed crops fed to dairy cows. Further, by limiting grain feeding (our goal for 2009 is to eliminate all grain feeding to the dairy cows), we reduce a whole host of problems created by the non-sustainable commercial agricultural system in use today. Row crops require some form of tillage (that promotes erosion, requires expensive equipment and consumes lots of diesel fuel), synthetic fertilizers (more oil) to grow the crops as most crop farms don't keep livestock to supply manure to enrich the soil, herbicides (petro chemicals) to control weeds that are not a problem for a cow/goat grazing operation, and insecticides (petro chemicals again) to protect a mono crop that would not require as much protection if it was grown in a rotation. Finally grazing operations make more sense because the livestock do most of the harvesting of their food stuffs. We need only to make some hay to get us through the winter months. By letting the cows and goats do the work of harvesting their feed, all we have to do is round them up every morning / evening at milking time, and we don't have tens of thousands of dollars tied up in equipment, another important part of sustainability.

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