Since merging with Agri-Mark (another New England dairy cooperative begun in 1918) in 1992, Cabot now consists of over 1,500 farms and produces over 300 million gallons of milk each year. Cabot is still owned by its farmers, though the number has grown quite a bit. In 2008, Cabot sold $350 million worth of cheese worldwide. The cooperative began producing cheese in 1930, and from there things went pretty much how you might imagine. When a group of local dairy farmers began producing more milk than they could sell, they bought the village creamery and used the excess milk for butter production. Vermont’s Cabot Creamery, now one of the largest manufacturers of industrial Cheddar in the United States, began in 1919 as a farmer’s cooperative. ‘Cheese is not made in the field, nor in the byre, nor in the cow,’ Harding said, ‘it is made in the dairy’. Though cleanliness and consistency are qualities that all cheesemakers strive for, and though the vision of the lone affineur in the aging room is an alluring one, Harding is hardly the terroir-obsessed, ‘real cheese’ artisan that turophiles fetishize. ‘The Joseph Harding Method’, though cultivated on a small English farm, seems to foreshadow the impersonal industry of commodity American Cheddar. While English Cheddar was indeed made before Harding’s birth in Somerset in 1805, it was Harding who sanitized and standardized its manufacture and taught his techniques to British and American cheesemakers, thus becoming singlehandedly responsible for the proliferation of Cheddar production in Europe and the United States. Cheddar cheese has a father, and his name is Joseph Harding.
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