Classic Swiss

“Just in time for milking!” our new WWOOF hosts Nicholas and Esther greeted us with a smile. It was 4:00 pm and we had just arrived at their house in the small city of Chateau d’Oex, nestled among the mountain valleys of French-speaking southeastern Switzerland.  Although we were tired after a day of travel, we heaved our bags into the back of their car and climbed in for the ride up to their alp for milking. The alp is a remote mountain valley up at 1500 meters, where their 37 milk cows and 75 young cows (some theirs, some boarding for the summer) spend the summer feasting on nourishing grass. In October, the cows will descend back to the milder climate of the low pastures near Chateau d’Oex for the fall and winter. Cows and cheese are a big deal around here, and we were excited to explore this Swiss tradition by delving into the life of a working farm.

After about 20 minutes winding up the valleys, we arrived at the alp. We helped Nicholas round up the cows from their pasture and herd them into the barn. The dog Anook was very entertaining, though not especially helpful with the herding. As Nicholas milked, he moved his body with the calm, deliberate efficiency of someone very familiar with the animals and the work. He has a deep personal connection with the cows – he knows every cow’s name, personality, quirks, history, and place in the barn. While he worked, he introduced us to his farm and philosophy. He grew up on this farm, loved farm life, and after an apprenticeship in agriculture took over the farm from his father. To become a farmer in Switzerland, you are required to do a 3-year hands-on apprenticeship as you would for any other trade job. He had a pivotal experience at one of his apprenticeship farms, which marketed its dairy, fruits, and vegetables directly to consumers. This experience opened his eyes to the ways that farming could be done on a small and local scale without too many middlemen.

As the farm transitioned into Nicholas’s hands, he began putting all of these ideas into practice. One unique aspect of the farm is that the cows eat only grass for their whole lives, including the winter (in the form of hay). Most other farmers, including organic ones, supplement their cows’ feed with grain for extra energy and milk production. However, Nicholas finds this to be unhealthy and unnatural for the cows since they evolved eating grass, not grain. This is just one example of the many decisions that Nicholas has made with the goal of increasing the cows’ quality of life and reducing stress. This naturally results in healthy animals with the highest quality milk and the best cheese. “Happy cows, happy people, happy planet,” Nicholas summed it up.

Nicholas and Esther also live these ideals in their own life. They believe deeply in the value of organic food and at home eat only organic. “Let me know if you see something that’s not organic,” said Nicholas lightheartedly. The only thing we could find were the endless jars of Ovalmaltine chocolate spread, which they had received by the caseful as a company promo for an organic event they were organizing. However, not being organic, it didn’t meet the standards and wasn’t distributed. But why waste it? Nicholas also talked about the value of sitting down together to enjoy nourishing meals rather than always rushing to get onto the next activity. If you are working that hard to promote health and wellbeing, you should get a taste of it in your own life as well.

Throughout our stay we enjoyed seeing how Nicholas and Esther try to live, work, and act in pure and principled ways. However, they didn’t seem to carry any of the ridigity or judgmentalism that often accompanies this impulse. They were just genuinely lovely, accepting, and positive people trying to live their own lives in the best way they can.

When the milking was done and the barn meticulously cleaned, Nicholas drove us a minute up the road to the rustic chalet where we would stay for the next 2 weeks. Although Nicholas and Esther live down in Chateau d’Oex, the rest of the farm helpers stay here at the chalet in the summer. This was made up of three people during our stay. There was Anna, an 18-year-old from the Appenzell region who has been coming to the farm on holiday for the past 5 years. She is a cellist who just finished high school and is planning on studying music in university. Then there was Valentine, who was helping on the farm for several months as part of his Civil Service requirement. All young men in Switzerland are required either to serve in the military or choose a civil service alternative (which is very popular). Finally, there was Michael, who is a former journalist starting a new career as a farmer. He was just approaching the end of his year-long stint at Nicholas’ farm as part of the 3-year apprenticeship program. He couldn’t definitively explain what drew him to farming. “Now I have no money and no time,” he laughed with a rueful grin. Farm apprentices officially work 52 hours a week. Although the work is exhausting, he deeply enjoys seeing the cows out on the pasture living the good life. We didn’t envy him when we heard him leaving the chalet at 5:30 each morning for milking, though.

Of all our WWOOF farms, this one had the most people around and the greatest feel of community, including a series of visitors and friends passing through. We especially enjoyed connecting with our more permanent chalet-mates Anna, Valentine, and Michael. All five of us are at various points in the searching stage of life – trying to find our place in the world by exploring and trying things out. It was interesting to hear about the different ways this process manifests itself in a different society. We heard again from the three of them how Switzerland tends to be closed-minded and stuck in its ways with lots of regulations. The country's mindset prevents life, spirit, creativity, and innovation from spontaneously bubbling up. But on the flip side, this mindset has also preserved a beautiful country and a lifestyle free of chaos. It was interesting to see another window into this familiar story coming from Swiss young people who are yearning for more freedom for experimentation and innovation in their own futures.

All That Goes Into Cheese

In the morning Nicholas picked us up to drive back down to Chateau d’Oex for breakfast with the family. Attached behind the car was the tank full of that morning’s milk. On the way into town we stopped at the fromagerie to drop off the milk. About 20 organic farmers from the valley pool their milk here to be made into cheese. There were a couple other farmers dropping off milk at the same time we were, and Nicholas greeted them with some affable chatter. He enjoys the feeling of camaraderie and community at the Fromagerie and appreciates the positivity of the conversations. They are proud to be organic farmers and find fulfillment in doing what they believe is right.

Although Nicholas delivered all his milk to the Fromagerie during our stay, he often makes his own cheese in the traditional way – a big copper kettle over a wood fire in the chalet. This leaves him with big wheels of fresh cheese, which he brings down to the valley’s cheese cave to be tended and turned by the employees as they age. On our way into town, we drove past the cheese cave and got to peer in the windows at the big wooden storage racks. Only cheese produced in the traditional way with milk from the L’Etivaz valley is allowed to be labeled as L’Etivaz cheese. Like many artisanal food products, the taste of L’Etivaz cheese is specific to that valley. It’s a manifestation of the valley’s character – its climate, soil, grass, cows, and special strain of bacterial culture all combine to create a cheese that has its own unique personality.

Over a breakfast of homemade jam, fresh bread from the bakery, and thick slices of their own alp cheese, we got to know Esther and their kids a bit more. Esther is a naturopathic doctor and runs their organic shop in town. At the shop, they sell all sorts of organic foods, home products, and natural medicines. One morning, Julia got to help with the twice-yearly big cleaning of the shop. Throughout our stay, it was fascinating to talk with Esther about her passion for holistic health. One of the most memorable messages that she emphasized was the way our mind creates our reality. She described how we can use the energies of good food, nourishing relationships, and positive mindsets to cultivate balance and health. Specifically, she is fascinated by the way our bodies and minds interact with the energetic vibrations described by quantum physics. It was cool to imagine how this whole unseen world of energy interacts with our health in ways not appreciated by conventional medicine.

The other members of the family are their kids Laurent (9) and Alicia (5), who are free schooled. This means that they have no defined curriculum or structure to their days, but learn through free exploration of the world around them. Nicholas and Esther have seen the school system getting more and more rigid, uncreative, and test-oriented over the years and wanted something more inspiring for their kids.

After breakfast it was time to put on gloves, pull out our Swiss Army knives, and go on the hunt. Our task was to zigzag around one of the pastures beheading and bagging up all the reddish seed heads of a weed that looked like an amaranth relative (nickname: “the seedy one.”) Most of our working hours over our first week would be spent clearing the pastures of undesired plants. We would become quite familiar with the characters of the different culprits.  The taproots of “the seedy one” were incredibly tenacious, orange, and half the length of our arm. The thistles’ roots had a frustrating tendency to snap when we were trying to uproot them. The wild rhubarb grew wide leaves that shaded out the grass below. The beautiful but cow-deadly yellow flowers were easy to mow down with endless swings of the scythe. The bushy marsh plants with their aromatic white flowers were less so, since they were hiding among the thick grasses by the stream. Once we knew which plants were bad, we began seeing them everywhere with a compulsive desire to destroy them.

Before our time at this farm, we never imagined that pasture management would be this much work. It is truly the work of generations, an endless human struggle against nature’s tendency towards wildness (exacerbated by the introduction of invasive species). It’s a task that we can never “win” but only keep working away at. As we have mentioned before, the Swiss government subsidizes farmers to maintain the landscape. If the inspectors come and find bad plants such as the toxic one with yellow flowers they will cut your subsidies. Since beating back these plants is a neverending struggle, it seemed like this would be a lot of stressful pressure to be under.

Another essential aspect of pasture management that we got to learn about (and more memorably, smell) is fertilization. Nicholas wants his farm to be a closed-loop system as much as possible. Rather than bringing in fertilizers, he is able to provide all the fertility he needs by recycling the cow manure back onto the pastures. Underneath the barn, the manure collects into a chamber of richly nutrient-dense liquid. One afternoon, Nicholas’s father Michelle loaded up this stinky gold into the manure spreader to spray on the fields. Forgetting to close our bedroom window in the chalet was a mistake we will only make once. Plus, the flies were in their heyday!

After our first week working against the weeds, our focus shifted in the second week towards haying. It was a real community effort as we worked together with Anna, Michael, and Valentine to rake the hay down the insanely steep slopes to a place where Nicholas could reach it on the tractor. The hillside was so steep, in fact, that when Colby lost his traction he slid all the way to the bottom without being able to stop, as Julia watched laughing from afar. Most of the work was done by Nicholas and his father using machines, but there were plenty of nooks and crannies and steep sections to keep us busy with hand raking. It was incredible to imagine the amount of human effort that went into the whole process before mechanization.

In addition to collecting loose hay to fan up into the barn, Nicholas also hires someone with bigger and fancier equipment to produce hay bales with some of the hay. Our job was to help to guide these rolling behemoths into the barn as they were deposited out of the back of the tractor. Here comes the first one… ready? We watched as the tractor spit out the hay bale towards the barn, only to watch with dismay as the big cylinder completely unraveled into clumps. The machine had malfunctioned and failed to secure the bale with mesh. So began the task of pitchforking the hay back up the slope to where the tractor could re-collect it for a much more successful try #2. After we had heaved and rolled and pivoted six hay bales into place at the back of the barn, we were all done. Hot, sweaty, and itchy, but satisfied that we had used our brain power to master big heavy objects. Although our feat didn’t rival Easter Island or the Egyptian pyramids, the bales did weigh a half-ton and we were proud of our work. By then we were more than ready to head down to the river and cool off with some raspberry sorbet. (Side note: the price of ice cream in Switzerland is shocking. Our precious pint of sorbet cost $9, and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s costs $10-12). The sorbet didn’t leave us quite cold enough, so we jumped into the exhilaratingly fresh river for a series of rapid icy immersions. Now we were truly refreshed!

In the evenings we relaxed at the chalet, breathing in the fresh air of the high valley and listening to the tinkling of cowbells. It was a classic pastoral scene of Switzerland, and it was hard to imagine a more lovely or peaceful place on the planet. We couldn’t have felt farther away from the chaos and suffering that exists in many parts of the globe. It was a strange dichotomy to contemplate: how can one world give birth to so many different realities?

At the end of the evening we would gather outside for a late dinner with Anna, Valentine, and Michael. Most of the meals involved lots of the farm’s delicious cheese. There was a young version, aged 4 months, and a stronger version, aged 1 year. In Switzerland our cheese consumption had soared to heights unfathomable by our old selves in Minnesota. And this farm only rocketed it up further. But for how much cheese we ate of just those two varieties, we surprisingly never got tired of it.

Outings

One evening we visited the local museum for a glimpse into the traditional life of the region. We marveled at many examples of the region’s well-known papercutting tradition, with exquisitely delicate and insanely time-consuming scenes of local human life and the natural world. Lacemaking also has a rich history here, and there was a demonstration table where Julia got to try her hand at the mind-boggling shuffle of threaded bobbins. Finally, it was touching to look at the care put into the objects of daily life on display in the museum. Seeing the elaborate wood inlays and carvings on the cabinets and chests from the 16th to 19th centuries made us appreciate all the artistry and craftsmanship that people invested in their belongings. Seeing the way objects were constructed so that their beauty and functionality would last for generations made us want to do the same in our own life.

For a full-day weekend outing, we set off to hike up to the rocky peak that watches over the top of the valley. After relaxing for a while at a tiny remote lake on the edge of the sky, and then blazing a trail by almost crawling up the steep grassy slopes, we finally reached the saddle. Gazing down into the valley below, we spotted a helicopter… taking off near our chalet. What was going on? We watched as it rose upwards and flew towards Nicholas’ higher chalet way up on the mountainside. Was it a medical emergency? Eventually it set off back down the valley. From afar, we could just make out what looked like a four-legged creature dangling on a cable below the helicopter. A cow? Later we found out that indeed it was a medical emergency, but of the bovine kind. To us, it was quite a new concept that someone would call a helicopter to evacuate a sick cow off the mountain. But we learned that it’s actually pretty routine and that Nicholas has to do it every year or two.

Alp Traditions   

As our stay at the farm wound to a close, we got to participate in the wild, entertaining, exhausting, thrilling chaos of herding 35 young cows up to their high summer pasture. Everyone turned out to help with the big event, including a number of Nicholas’s friends and family. As we all gathered in anticipation outside the chalet, we had trouble  imagining that this task could really require all 15 or more of us. But it sure did… and we could have used many more. The cows had a mind of their own, and after a few fanning stampedes in the wrong direction we finally got them through the gate. But it remained a time of intense concentration as we constantly fought to keep them from going wayward. After an hour and a half of frantically running and scrambling and trying to funnel them in the right direction, we arrived breathless and sweat-drenched at the high alp pasture where the cows will graze for the next couple months. Once they were safely in the pasture, everyone could finally congratulate each other with a job well done as we walked back to the lower chalet.

Back at the chalet as night settled in, the whole gang gathered inside for dinner. A thunderstorm had rolled in, and we ate together enveloped in the cozy warmth of convivial chatter. Esther had spent the evening cooking a smooth cheesy vegetable soup. She served it the traditional way: in communal wooden bowls into which everyone dips their unique personal hand-carved ladles (double-dipping worrywarts are not allowed). Nicholas told us the entertaining history of this serving style. Historically, only men would come up to the Alp in the summer, and this dish-efficient practice developed when the men realized they had no women to do the dishes for them. Although that is no longer the situation, this fun tradition lives on. With fresh bread and ample amounts of cheese, the meal was a joyful celebration of Alp life. We really felt like we had been welcomed right into the family. Nicholas talked fondly about spending his entire childhood summers up here at the alp. With his 4 siblings and lots of friends coming and going all the time, his mother was always cooking for at least 10 people. It sounded like a wonderful place to grow up, a slice of the good life even though the work is hard.

The next morning was our final day at the farm. Nicholas had not made his own wood-fired cheese during our stay, so he arranged to have us visit his neighbors up the mountain who also do it the traditional way. The pair of neighbors, an older man and a younger man, seemed like very traditional Alp farmers who couldn’t speak a word of English. Even though the only language we had in common with them was our 3-word French vocabulary (“bonjour,” “merci,” “fromage,”) we managed to cobble together a communication of smiles and hand gestures. With the help of Google translate we learned that they milk 35 cows, about the same number as Nicholas. Anyway, it was a delight to watch the magical transformation of milk into cheese. And it was quite an involved process.

We arrived at 10 am, after the farmers had already added the bacterial culture to the milk in a big copper kettle. As they stirred it by hand, they monitored it carefully, frequently dipping their hand in to check the consistency of the developing curdles. Then, at the perfect moment they pivoted the big kettle over the wood fire. Over the next 50 minutes, an automatic stirrer would keep the milk swirling as it heated at a specific rate to a specific final temperature. There was something mesmerizing and utterly peaceful about the scene – the endless swirling of the milk, the brassy pinkish glow of the copper, the smell of wood smoke, the crackling of the fire, the cozy darkness of the chalet. It felt like we had stepped back in time, with the cheese being made in largely the same way it has been for centuries. It was also encouraging to see that the tradition of artisanal cheese is staying alive and well by continuing into the hands of younger farmers.

For keeping local food traditions alive, it helps that Swiss food safety laws are designed to (gasp!) make food safe, rather than to require people to build multi-thousand dollar facilities. Because in the United States, this setting would never fly: a crowded little room connected to the cow barn with low ceilings of dusty soot-stained wood beams. As the cheese was stirring, the farmers would dip a little strainer in to remove the flies and other random black flecks that swirled into the milky vortex. But for as rustic as the operation appeared, the farmers were very mindful of keeping the food safe.

By now it was a little after 11 and while we waited for the milk/cheese to heat, our hosts invited us to sit down for lunch with them. Although we had just had breakfast an hour and a half before, we couldn’t say no to a plate of rossli (ah, the endless appeal of fried potato dishes!), some meats produced in the valley, and some slices of their own cheese. They topped it off by serving us the classic alp dessert of meringues drenched in fresh sweet cream from the cows, good but stomach-churningly rich.

When we were finished with lunch it was time to check on the cheese again. In the kettle above the fire, the milk had reached 52ºC and was turning quickly into cheese. After all the waiting, it was suddenly time to work fast – the farmers swept a big net of cheesecloth into the kettle and transferred the massively heavy catch of cheese across the room into an enormous wheel mold sitting on the counter. Then they repeated the cheesecloth process one more time. Each day, the farm produces two 20-30kg wheels of cheese, which they send to the bottom of the valley on their private cable car and then drive to the cheese cave for aging. By about 1 pm, the big process was finished and we hiked back down the mountain. We now had a great appreciation for all the work that goes into the cheese we enjoy, especially when it is made in the traditional way.

We couldn’t have asked for a more fitting experience to cap off our time in Switzerland. The past two weeks in general had felt like the epitome of Swiss-ness. Rocky ridgelines, lush pastures, cows, cheese, hay, chalets, fresh mountain air… it felt like something out of a story book but it was all real. In the morning it was time to leave this beautiful farm. We waved goodbye to the cows, gave Nicholas and Esther a farewell hug, and boarded the train toward Munich.