02 July 2020

An hour in a cow pasture in Auvergne

September 2009. After walking around in Tournemire and having lunch there, we drove up to the top of the Puy Mary, an ancient extinct volcano that tops out at about six thousand feet (1800+ meters). The weather was iffy — we'd had showers earlier in the day but not in Tournemire. On top of the volcano it was windy, foggy, and raining. We couldn't see anything.

We really wanted to see more sites and activities that had to do with dairy farming and cheese-making in the region around Salers. We read somewhere about two farms where we could see the milking process. The first one was a bust — nobody was there. The second, a farm run by the Rodde family an hour east of Salers, near the village called Cheylade, was the jackpot. We were able to walk out into a cow pasture and watch Jean-Pierre Rodde and his crew milking his Salers cows.



Salers cows won't give milk unless their calves are present. So the cows and calves are in the pasture together. A calf is let out of a pen they're kept in, finds his mother, and starts suckling. That starts the milk-giving. The calf is tied to one of its mother's front legs and the milking machine, powered by a tractor, is strapped on and takes over. The milking takes a while, because there are a lot of cows (see the slideshow above) and they aren't all milked simultaneously. This was the afternoon milking. There's also one early in the morning. Cheese is therefore made twice a day, morning and evening. It was raining and we had to step carefully to avoid cow patties, which were slippery and mucky.

In a document in French that I found here there's a passage (on page 6) that describes the Roddes' family business, which does both meat and milk/cheese production. The article is about a group's visit to the farm one afternoon in 2012. Here's my translation:
In the afternoon, [our] group visited Mr. Rodde's farm in Cheylade (15). Rodde uses a very traditional system (called “Salers Milking”) and processes the milk into Cantal-type cheese. His is one of the last farms to use this method —in fact, fewer than 10 farms continue the practice — which involves milking by machine out in the pasture with “priming” done by the suckling calf. The calf is then tied to one of its mothers’ front legs so that the cowherd can attach the milking machine and continue the process.

Mr. Rodde's farm has 130 hectares [320 acres] of pastureland, [with] 115 Salers cows milked in winter and 85 during the summer season. The whole herd is made up of purebred Salers stock. The heifers calve in December; the cows calve in January or February. Grass-fed calves are held aside in order to be marketed in mid-winter. The cows’ feed is based on fresh grass in summer and dry hay in winter. Four people work on the farm, Mr. and Mrs. Rodde, their son, and one employee.

The milk is processed on the farm, as is the aging of the young cheeses [called tommes]. Production reaches 250 wheels of [Cantal] cheese per year, each weighing around 40 kilograms [nearly 90 lbs.] when ripe and requiring 450 liters [about 120 U.S. gallons) of milk for their production. The cheese is sold at the farm but also in the Paris area.

The sustainability of this method of milking is greatly endangered because of the costs and working conditions it requires. Those disadvantages explain the steep decline of this traditional system designed for use with the Salers breed of cattle. A similar method used to be practiced in the Aubrac [...region to the south] but it has now been abandoned.

12 comments:

  1. We had Salers cattle on my friends' farm in the Gers - oh those horns were scary! They were raising them for beef rather than for dairy produce, but switched over to something else later on.
    Incidentally it's 10 years this month since I moved to France from Australia.

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    1. Hi Mike. Still have those big, beautiful dogs?

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    2. Yes! I have a new little big beautiful dog. He's 5 months old and very sweet.

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    3. Still just a big beautiful puppy, hein!

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  2. Those Salers cows are beautiful creatures. We had to watch our step out there in the field lol- that day was both fun and educational.

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  3. When we stayed in Saint Chamant we visited a cheese producer down the road, within walking distance of our gite I believe. We really just went to get some cheese, not necessarily to see the cows or the cheesemaking operation. I remember going down to the cellar, where there were several very large wheels of cheese (presumably Cantal). They were each of different ages, and we just pointed to the ones we wanted and they cut off a chunk and weighed it. Very good cheese.

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  4. Thanks for sharing the Salers milking story!

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  5. Beautiful cows! What Judy said.

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  6. L'été, en Aubrac, les vaches de la race Aubrac étaient en estives regroupant plusieurs exploitations. Les buronniers s'occupaient de la traite et de la fabrication du fromage, comme pour les Salers. Je me souviens être allée voir des cousins buronniers... le métier était difficile et les conditions de vie bien sommaires ! Aujourd'hui, pour les touristes, les gens du pays organisent une transhumance (alors que les bêtes sont maintenant acheminées par camions sur les prés d'altitude... et dans les quelques burons bien équipés on peut manger aligot et truffade dans des conditions qui n'ont plus rien à voir avec ce que vivaient les anciens buronniers !

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    1. Christiane, au prrintemps de 1944, j'étais dans la maquis dans les monts du Cantal et mon groupe avait trouvé refuge dans un assez grand buron. Le moins qu'on puisse dire est que c'était en effet assez primitif!i

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  7. The Salers cow looks not unlike the Scottish Highland, although those have longer fur and horns. Maybe all cows had such horns before people starting breeding them down to look like Herefords.
    What a great adventure, seeing such a traditional milking method underway.

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    1. It turns out to be a highlight of all my time in France since 2003. I grew up in a town on the Carolina coast, so I never had much contact with farm animals.

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