Inside of the Young’s Jersey Dairy in Yellow Springs, shelves of cheese curds dripped excess moisture onto the floor.
The CEO of Young’s Jersey Dairy, Dan Young, pointed to a massive silver vat imported from the Netherlands filled with the uncut curds, ready to be converted into a variety of cheeses.
“So all the cheeses are going to start the same way when we're making it. … We start off putting the milk, the raw milk, unpasteurized milk into our vat,” he said.
Young said when it comes to Swiss cheese, they use milk with a higher fat percentage for a creamier taste.
“Ours is whole, which means the butterfat level is sort of like what the cow's mood was … but it's usually around maybe 4 to 4.5% butterfat,” he said.
Young’s makes about 4000 pounds of Swiss cheese annually.
But that’s just a a small fraction of the more than 147 million pounds of Swiss cheese Ohio produced in 2023 alone.
While Ohio may be number two in egg production and number five for soybeans, we take the number one spot for Swiss cheese.
How its made
After the curds drain, they go into a saltwater tub for flavor. Then they add prokaryotic bacteria to the cheese and let it sit for a month.
During that time, the bacteria starts to release gas and Swiss cheese gains its most distinctive feature.
“When that carbon dioxide escapes, it kind of pops and that's what makes the holes, or the eyes as they're called in industry terms,” said Mike Walpole, National Sales manager for Brewster Cheese in Brewster, Ohio.
The Northeast Ohio company has been in operation for six decades, taking the lead in production numbers for Ohio. Walpole said they typically transform 30 million pounds of milk into 3 million pounds of cheese a month.
“It's still the original family that owns the company. It's under fourth generation leadership right now with Kathy Leeman, she's the owner,” he said. “And Fritz Lehman still is part-owner. So we're very proud of our heritage in the area here in Ohio.”
Young’s and Brewster are two of 12 Swiss cheese producers in Ohio.
While there aren’t Swiss cheese specific numbers, the state’s dairy industry contributes 35 billion dollars of economic impact each year.
“Obviously the Swiss cheese being an exciting number one industry, but it's just so many different dairy products that our producers and our processors are able to, one, produce and then bring into the processing level here in Ohio,” said Brian Baldridge, the Director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture.
A Swiss history
So of all those different dairy products, how did Ohio become a Swiss cheese leader?
According to the Ohio History Connection, the first wave of Swiss immigrants came to Ohio for religious reasons around 1819.
Other immigrants from Switzerland followed in the 1830s looking for economic opportunities and they found them through the land in Ohio which was similar to some areas of their homeland.
A 1935 article from the Daily Reporter in Dover, Ohio reported that Swiss cheese was being produced in Dover as early as 1860.
Following the first World War, Swiss cheese production spread to factories in 11 Ohio counties including Wayne, Medina and Monroe.
According to the Daily Reporter, Ohio was at that point recognized as the “very best” in the nation’s Swiss cheese markets. Now, a full century later, that’s still the case.
While cheese may not be quite the money maker that soybeans or corn are, Baldridge with the ODA, says it’s still impressive.
“As we look at Ohio cheese production in general, we're 10th overall,” he said. “So a big part of the dairy industry in general and just an amazing part of the overall agriculture economy.”