From the small office adjoining the cheese dairy, Frédérique Giovanni has a bird’s eye view of the valley, its forests, its isolated houses which punctuate the slopes and, above all, its vast meadows. “When you mow, in front of you, you have everyone mowing too. You see them on the road hauling trailers of straw and you don’t feel alone at all. We have a culture here that is very peasant-like.” says the 56-year-old farmer, whose operation, an organic breeding of seventy dairy goats, has been established since 1972 in the village of Lapoutroie (Haut-Rhin), at an altitude of 850 meters.
In this mid-mountain valley of the Alsatian Vosges, five villages and dozens of hamlets, about twenty kilometers from Colmar, farmers, mostly dairy cow breeders, are legion. “There are seventy farms in four villages. It’s something very special here. Lots of people have a brother, a father, a neighbor who is a farmer, so they understand this world”explains Frédérique Giovanni, elected to the Haut-Rhin Chamber of Agriculture.
One of the reasons for this peasant “overpopulation” can be found in the 1960s. Jean Mathieu, technician at the Chamber of Agriculture and influential man in the canton, impulse SO modernizing the farms and tarmacing the paths right up to the barns. Objective: to bring the Lactalis truck to collect the milk, at a time when “farmer’s cheese didn’t work, it was a bit of a jerk thing”, says laughing Simon Basler, 36 years old, associated with Emilie Simon, 39 years old, on the Pierrevelcin-Basler farm. The other explanation lies in the construction, over the decades, of a virtuous ecosystem, which includes consumers attached to quality local products.
“This territory is an opportunity”
Today, the Lactalis truck still passes, but it has stopped coming where the quantities became too low, too random, where it was necessary to chain in winter or travel on Sundays. Not profitable enough. “We weren’t very good customers,” confirms Gaël Marchal, 27 years old, at the head of the Champ-de-la-Croix farm, with its twenty dairy cows. The Marchals, converted to organic farming in 1994, devoted most of their milk to making barkass, the local mountain tomme, intended for direct sale. Gaël Marchal, like the overwhelming majority of breeders in the valley, took the same path as his parents. It was necessary, since Lactalis stopped coming to collect milk in “2014 or 2015”. Its products are sold at Cellier des Montagnes, a producers’ store in Lapoutroie, where farmers take turns running the show.
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