FARMSTEAD CHEESE RISK REDUCTION AND MONITORING PROGRAM….REPORT ON 2007 and 2008

This program created a pilot project for testing samples of milk, cheese, and the creamery environment. The pilot project started in June, 2007 and is heading towards the end of its second year of operation. A SARE grant enabled the program to pay for the costs of shipping samples and testing for the first six months of the first year. During the first two months of the pilot project I made visits to twenty-four farms that make cheese, in New York and New England. I helped the farmers to create a practical sampling and testing program for their milk, cheese, and creamery environment. I taught them to take samples and interpret results. I left each farmer with resource materials, including “Food Safety Plans for the Artisanal Cheesemaker....Step by Step” and several guidelines from the Dairy Practices Council concerning milk quality and HACCP planning. We structured the project so that all of the results from AgriMark’s Central Laboratory in West Springfield, MA were sent via email to me first. I reviewed these results and sent them on to the farmers with comments. This kind of teamwork involving the producers and a field agent made it possible to find sources of contamination and prevent any serious incidents that posed a consumer health risk. The hardest part of this work was to figure out where to set the level of a “contaminant,” for example, coliform bacteria that should cause the farmer/cheesemaker to look around for a source, find it, and clean it up. The level is called a “critical level” because it involves a trigger mechanism for action to be taken. It was easier to set critical levels for the other bacteria that we tested for, such as the E. coli and the pathogens: Staph. aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, and E. coli 0157.H7, because there are generally-agreed-upon levels that are used in the UK, EU, Canada and the USA.

Many of the farmer/cheesemakers already had training in HACCP planning. The testing was used to monitor the HACCP program of each farm and ensure that their plan was working. This year the farmers are paying for their own shipping and testing and I am still being paid by the grant to be the field agent. In addition to gathering data and giving advice, I have been writing short reports that I have shared with the pilot project group. There are still eighteen participants, which may indicate that this program is important to the well being of farmstead cheese businesses. The peace of mind that comes from knowing that you are running a clean operation counts for most of the success. Another part is the ability to reduce the possibilities for serious contaminations of the cheese, hence the use of the phrase “risk reduction.” Lastly, there is probably an effect of increasing the overall quality of the cheeses due to the farmstead cheesemakers training and increased knowledge of food safety.

I thought I’d share some of the reports about milk and cheese quality on this web site. It may give you some important information to help you “tighten things up a bit” at your farm and creamery. For raw milk being used for raw milk cheese it is important to watch levels of coliform, E. coli, Staph. aureus, thermoduric (heat-tolerant) bacteria, psychrotrophic bacteria, and SCC. These are also important for pasteurized milk going into cheese. Although the coliform and E. coli will be eliminated without any deliterious effects to cheesemaking, the thermoduric and psychrotrophic bacteria will release enzymes as they are destroyed. Some of these are strong proteases and lipases and may be responsible for off-flavors and shelf-life reduction in cheese. Staph. aureus must be present at more than 100,000/ml to produce enough toxin to cause illness. The following results give a picture of the milk being used to make farmstead cheese within the pilot project group of twenty- four farms. Unless there are actually pathogens in the milk there is no valid association between a level of a certain bacteria or somatic cells in milk and a risk to public health.

The best way to protect the consumer is to test a sample from every batch of cheese. This is impractical because the average farmstead cheesemaker cannot afford to spend $75 per batch for shipping and testing. Therefore, a random sampling approach, which identifies the riskiest cheeses (low acid, high moisture, fast ripening) and sets a timetable for periodic sampling, is used. The cheeses are tested within a week of sale so that the results can be used to prevent batches of cheese from being distributed. We tested cheeses using this method and, although Listeria species were found in several samples, further testing revealed that the pathogen was not present. There was only one incidence of a pathogen (E. coli 0157.H7) in 95 samples of raw milk cheese and no cases of pathogens in 45 samples of pasteurized milk cheese. E. coli counts in the cheese containing the pathogen were 1,000 per gram. This indicates that the pathogen level was too low to cause illness but the cheese was withheld from the market because once it would have left the farm it would no longer have been under the control of the producer.

Reports from this year and last year are listed in the files below:

• 2007 Pilot Project Milk Results Summary
• 2007 Pilot Project Cheese Results
• Coliform and E. coli
• High coliform counts in cheese
• Listeria info
• CA dairies set safety standards for raw 9-07
• NE SARE PILOT PROJECT SUMMARY FOR 2008
• EUROPEAN SYSTEMS FOR THE SAFE
  PRODUCTION OF RAW MILK CHEESE
• THE GERMAN SYSTEM
  

Information about the beginning of this project is contained in the file:

• Introduction to the Farmstead Cheese Safety Risk Reduction Project

Thanks to Northeast SARE for making this program possible.
For more information please call or e-mail Peter Dixon at 802-387-4041 or dixonpeter@mac.com.

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