ENUMCLAW — Paul Fantello and Patricia Ciatto make pretty cheese at their creamery just outside town, pressing the buttery milk from their brown Jersey cows into bulbous wheels with rust-yellow rinds and moon-white cores.
And they tell a pretty story about resurrecting a dairy farm once operated by Fantello’s Italian-born grandmother, who arrived in Enumclaw more than 100 years ago.
But many of their workdays are more brutal than pretty, because running a small cheese-making venture in 2023 means waking up before dawn, wading through smelly muck in the rain and hoisting heavy curds until your arms throb.
That’s why Fantello and Ciatto, the business partners who started Fantello Farmstead Creamery between 2015 and 2018, have been breathing easier recently, since securing a $250,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture under a program authorized by a massive and complicated law called the Farm Bill.
The Farm Bill, expiring this year and slated for renewal, pending negotiations between Democrats and Republicans, is how Congress funds an array of agricultural and food initiatives, including subsidies and insurance for commodity crops like soybeans and corn, rural development and conservation projects, agricultural export programs, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.
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