Red Bank’s Cheese Cave, a Great Addition to Monmouth County Local Markets

While the focus of this blog is on small-scale New Jersey farming and related issues, we’ve never lost sight of the bigger picture around local and regional food systems and Red Bank’s Cheese Cave is a mighty fine addition to central New Jersey and New Jersey Shore food culture and systems. Friends of ours hosted a cheese and wine tasting over the weekend and Steve Catania, the Cheese Cave’s owner, brought his wares and did not disappoint.

Serving up seven cheeses to complement the thirty wines our good friends graciously purchased and provided, Steve provided a history of the different cheeses and served up a quick tip on pairing wine and cheese:

“If it grows together, it goes together”

meaning that a Spanish goat cheese for instance, would go quite well with a Spanish White or a Fromage de Meaux goes well with an Alsatian White. And of course, a nice Port goes quite well with Stilton.

Steve also emphasized the differences between farmstead and artisan cheeses, farmstead cheeses being made and processed entirely on a specific farm where the animals are raised and milked, and artisan cheeses which are made by hand and usually ripened or aged in localized cheese caves near the farm or cheesemaker.

The Cheese Cave is also an active participant in the local community and community events. This event was held at our friend’s beautiful apartment in downtown Red Bank. And every Friday The Cheese Cave offers a cheese tasting from 5pm -8pm for $5 on their premises at 14 Monmouth Street. You can bring your own wine and they even provide the glasses. It’s a great pre-dinner or pre-movie event and a wonderful place to gather after getting off the train at the end of a long week.

During last July 4th’s Kaboom Fest, the Cheese Cave even offered to go boxes of cheese for picnics which you could take down with you to the river bank for a picnic while enjoying the fireworks.

The Cheese Cave
14 Monmouth Street
Red Bank, NJ, 07701

Farms in Middlesex County? You Betcha!

Via Woodbridge Patch: Middlesex Farmers Win Statewide Excellence Awards

Nice pickup for farmers from one of New Jersey’s most crowded counties. I’m a big fan of Hauser Farms who serve the Red Bank Farmers Market every year. The same family has farmed the same land in Old Bridge for over 125 years.

Innovative New Jersey: Farmers and Foodies Look to Extend New Jersey’s Growing Season Year-Round

Nice coverage by the Press of Atlantic City on collaboration and innovation across New Jersey’s agricultural, food, and academic sectors. Everyone’s pulling together to enable Garden State produce and products to be available year-round.

USDA Helps Restore NJ Wetlands at Duke Farms

Great article on the work the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Agency is doing to help restore wetlands. The 500 acre project is part of the National Wetlands Reserve Project which helps private landowners restore productive wetlands. For farmers, the program provides ways to use marginal or unproductive lands for purposes other than intensive, fertilizer-based crop cultivation. The wetlands restoration projects can help restore soil quality and reduce flooding as well as provide a carbon sink for greenhouse gases and wildlife habitat.

5,000 acres of wetlands are currently being restored in New Jersey. Nationally, 2.3 million acres are enrolled in the wetlands restoration program.

More creative partnerships like these are what is needed to protect and preserve New Jersey’s land base.

By the Numbers: New Jersey’s Land Base Under Pressure

Over the weekend, Michele Byers, Executive Director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, published an opinion piece where she ran through the numbers on New Jersey sprawl. This is a very important read and is based on Rowan University’s June report on land use patterns in Monmouth and Somerset Counties, which finds large-lot development to be the norm. Projecting the trends into the future, Byers sees some not so smart growth with a very stark split between the locations of jobs and homes in the Garden State.

A little over a year and a half ago I looked at New Jersey’s land base numbers in my post Farms, Open Space Preservation and Business Development: Perfect Together. Over a thirty year period, New Jersey lost 384,000 acres of farmland to development in a state of 4.8 million acres. Combined with losses in forests and wetlands, 672,00 acres of open space disappeared in this same thirty year period between the early 1970′s and the early 2000s. We can’t continue to lose land at this pace, especially if we want to continue to be a national leader in agricultural production and ensure that our farms, farm stands and farmers markets continue to be located close to home.

Agriculture may actually be New Jersey’s true competitive advantage. Continued sprawl can only put increased pressures on our land base and working farms, increase our commute times and erode our state economy.