Salers cheese production halted in France because of drought – The Washington Post

Every year, farmers in France’s central region of Auvergne repeat the same process. During summer and fall, their cows graze in pastures, eating to their hearts’ content. It’s only during this time that farmers can produce salers, a highly regulated semihard cheese with the same buttery depth as a well-aged cheddar.In the mountainous and volcanic region of Auvergne, 78 farmers toil between April 15 and Nov. 15 to turn more than 3 million gallons of milk into about 2.4 million pounds of salers cheese each year, according to France’s Ministry of Agriculture. During those seven months, dairy cows graze as much as possible on fresh grass. Their raw milk is collected on a wooden container and then curdled, pressed and salted. The mixture is then left to ripen in a cylindrical mold for three months to a year.“Salers is a seasonal cheese, made with the seasonal grass. It’s one of the pillars of its identity,” Laurent Lours, president of L’AOP Salers, a local group of cheesemakers, told France Bleu. “With more hay [instead of grass], the paste would be whiter; we would have less flavors. Our product still has a certain reputation among consumers — we don’t want to break it.”“The ground is so dry, so hard, that in some places it looks like ashes. It’s dust,” Laurent Roux, a farmer, told France Bleu, adding that his cows had not grazed since late June. “We have always had periods of drought in the summer, but this is hard, very hard.”When a similar situation came up in 2019, L’AOP Salers requested and was granted a waiver to use milk from cows with a local grass intake of just 50 percent. But the dryness this year has proven so harsh that taking a similar route “is not worth it,” Lours said: “We do not even have enough for 50 percent of the grass.”The specter of the drought looms large for the dairy farmers, who are already grappling with higher fuel costs and food prices. One option they have, Lours told La Montagne, is to use their milk to make cantal, a type of cheese similar to salers but without as many restrictions. Yet that itself comes with a financial loss, since salers is valued higher than cantal.