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Anne's Story



NORTHERN HARVEST: TWENTY MICHIGAN WOMEN IN FOOD AND FARMING
https://www.waynesupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/northern-harvest

ANNE HOYT

Anne’s story begins in a little town in northern France, Roubaix, where I once visited friends, admired their newborn son, and enjoyed a tarte à l’oignon. 
By age 18 Anne had left home and was working on a communal farm with its vegetable garden, chickens, bread making, everything sustainable.  Later she worked picking fruits and then started a poultry farm, and then moved to Switzerland where she shepherded young cows. 
Anne started making cheese—the famous Raclette—when she met and married her Michigan-born husband, John Hoyt, already a cheesemaker in the Swiss Alps.
“It was the most beautiful place at 2,000 meters in the Alps, no electricity, no running water, milking cows by hand, and I just fell in love with the job and the place and with the guy.”

It took five years after moving to Leelanau County before they could start their cheese business, the first cheese business in the region, an uphill struggle until their Raclette began winning awards. 25 years later it’s famous not only in the region but nationally. But never easy.
“Cheese-making is an everyday challenge. We work with the milk we get, with the atmosphere in the cheese cellar, a lot of things happen in the creamery. . . We learn all the time. At the end, if the product is good, I’m happy.”

To read more of Anne’s story and go behind the scene to learn what happens in the creamery, and to read about the lives of 19 other amazing women, Northern Harvest is available now by ordering online from Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

In this time of quarantine you can order cheeses from Leelanau Cheese for curbside pickup or for shipping in or out of state by phoning 231-271-2600.


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