Working at a grocery store did not make 21-year-old Les Harrison happy.
“I saw that I needed to be self-employed,” he ruefully admits. “I’m not too good with authority figures.” It’s the only other job he’s ever had, and he only had it briefly, during one particular off-season at Sweetwoods Dairy. The goat farm is his parents’ creation. Started 14 years ago in rural Peña Blanca, today the 85-goat business produces cheese in ten or twelve varieties (they’re an experimental dairy, always adding some and dropping others). While Les’s mother still does the bulk of the dairy’s cheesemaking, Les has taken over most of the business-related chores from his semi-retired dad.
Les was 8 years old when his family moved to the farm in 1991. The other kids at the local public school were “a little bit rough on the light-skinned kids,” Les remembers, so his older brother opted not to go and to be home-schooled, instead. “We both had to work but I had a pretty light chore load compared to him. I only got $3 a day and, when I saw my brother making some decent money, I got sort of jealous. So then we both stayed home.” Growing up, Les did a little of everything, from maintenance jobs like irrigation and fencing to straining the curds a few times, although “I really don’t enjoy kitchen work,” he admits.
His brother opted out of continuing with the family business ( “He left the day he turned 18 and moved to Albuquerque”), but Les decided to stay. “I think I had it a little sweeter than my brother did. I got to do some of the more favorable jobs, like sales and delivery–which to me is the best job because I get to know people by name and see how much they appreciate what we do. And the business was three years older by the time I reached 18, so things were going more smoothly. Plus, my parents were willing to help with my tuition to business classes at TVI in Albuquerque, and that was another incentive because I wanted to do bookkeeping and accounting. Besides,” he adds, “I have a really good relationship with my parents. They trust me to make the right business decisions.”
The artisanal approach to food, a worldwide response to the past several decades’ worth of large scale, homogenized and anonymous factory farming, is second nature to Les, whose family’s farm epitomizes the personalized, local-versus-global attitude. He believes that we lose the visceral pleasure of sharing food and conversation when we get locked into that grab-a-bite-and-keep-on-running routine. “And the way that everything is mass-produced,” he continues, “means that everything has to be shipped by some third party, which costs in fuel and advertising, as compared with putting fresh food on someone’s table in your own region.”
He’s proud of the methods employed at Sweetwoods Dairy. “Our cheese is a lot less processed and it’s a lot fresher. Also, some of the bigger farm owners overfeed their yearling goats to increase their growth. And they become big producers of milk but that cuts down on their longevity–those goats only live to be about four years old. Our goats are pretty pampered. They get free range, they always have food and water, instead of just twice a day, and we avoid harsh veterinary products like antibiotics–we only use those to save a goat’s life, and we use things like garlic and electrolytes for their immune systems.”
This past fall, Les was fortunate enough to be sponsored by Slow Food Santa Fe to attend the international Terra Madre event in Turin, Italy. Initially it was Les’s mother who was approached about going; she offered the chance to Les in her stead– “She likes to send the better opportunities my way to get me sucked into the family business, plus she didn’t have the time to go herself, at that point.” He found the whole experience a real eye-opener. Particularly impressive to Les was the fact that people attending from all over the world, including those just barely getting by, were encouraged by the conference to continue their sustainable practices even though the incentives still aren’t especially apparent. “That was good to know,” he says. He was particularly impressed by the Italians’ much slower, more civilized sit-down approach to meals. “They have a little bit of wine with their food, and many different courses. It makes the whole dining experience more enjoyable–people lighten up and converse more.”
And he found the food in Italy to be much better quality. “It’s not as commercialized as here. In our country, the same chain of restaurants exist everywhere, unless you go somewhere high-end, but in Italy, the restaurants are more affordable and less commercialized.” Did he like Italian cheese? Les chuckles. “To be honest? The cheese in Italy was not to my palate. They don’t use as much salt as the French and Americans do in their cheese.”
Les is basically content with the farm the way it is; his business plans don’t include much in the way of radical change. “We grew the herd at one point to over a hundred, but it turned out we were working harder for basically the same return. So no, I’m really just trying to achieve a fine balance between living my 21-year-old bachelor life in Albuquerque and running this whole business successfully. So that’s the dream–nothing too big.”
The farm’s a honed-down operation, at this point, with just his mother, himself and one other full-time employee. The goal is to gradually ease his mother into retirement, too. “So right now, we’re just trying to treat our employee as best we can, like a part of the family, and eventually we’ll need to find someone who can help with the hands-on, day-to-day cheesemaking.” He’s not worried about how he’ll accomplish that. “We’ll sort it out.”
In the meantime, when asked about the future of artisanal foods in New Mexico, he respectfully declines to venture a guess. “I wouldn’t know the answer to that on a state-wide level. But I will say that our part of the world is getting away from sustainable farming and a lot of food diversity, and we’re trying to change that.”
Which, when you think about it, is actually the perfect answer. Because in order to buck the trend of the all-consuming mega-giant agribusiness’s churning out chemical-laden foods that promote obesity, land degradation and such hideous illnesses as mad cow disease, we all need to slow way down, take a look around, see who’s producing small-scale, hands-on, seasonal and locally grown food products, and each of us commits to supporting those businesses, instead. One small, considered step at a time.
