【Sasaki Farm】 Early-Summer Italian Dinner Tour at the Sasaki Dairy Farm

How to become a dairy farmer

Up until the 1960s, the Sasaka-family was a run-of-the-mill Japanese farming family, growing rice and silkworms. After WWII, however, livestock farming started to be promoted as part of the national agricultural policy, leading the Sasaki family to take a chance at dairy farming.

This was the very policy in which livestock- and fruit farming were promoted in order to improve citizens’ diets, which led to the current status of Fukushima as a major fruit-producing paradise.

Understanding the spirit of the times, the Sasaki family stopped producing silkworms and focused on dairy and wet-rice cultivation, increasing its stock to around 20 cows and 10 calves by the mid-70s.

By the time Mitsuhiro Sasaki grew up, dairy farming was already the main business, and together with his four siblings he took care of the cows on a daily basis while attending school.

After graduating from a local high school, Sasaki-san started working for a dairy farm in Tokachi (Hokkaido Pref.). He received 3 years of training as a living-in farmer, before moving back to his parental home in Fukushima in 1991.

Responding to local needs

As the dairy farming project was just underway, the farm learned there was demand for delicious, freshly-squeezed pasteurized milk. It was a request from a group of ladies living in the Horai residential area in Fukushima City. This is how Sasaki Farm started its milk-delivery service.

They first focused on home-delivery and wholeselling to co-ops. However, because of their policy of collecting- and reusing glass milk bottles, which became more and more troublesome, wholesale started taking a back seat. This led to the farm’s policy of exclusively focussing on home delivery. As the delivery practice included collecting the empty bottles again, this was a great deal for consumers.

Small scale as an advantage

Even though the farm is small, the factory that pasteurizes and bottles the milk is located right next to the cow barn. The head of the factory was Mitsuhiro-san’s mother. When Sasaki-san was 39 years old, however, he took up management of the factory too.

As the long, slow process of pasteurization at 63℃ for 30 minutes takes a lot of time and effort, and the milk can only be produced in small batches, it is hard to compete on price with the large players in the milk market. Nonetheless, the locals keep on purchasing.

The reason for this continued popularity is likely that the entire process takes place locally.

Raising the cattle, the milk production and the processing is all done on a plot of land small enough to cover by a short walk. Perhaps the fact that the whole process is overseeable makes it easier to maintain quality than one can expect from mass-production.

There are dairy farmers that aim at high-quality production for the wealthy classes in urban areas. However, as Sasaki-san says: “If we had done that, we would have surely lost everything during the 2011 disaster. It is thanks to our relationship with the local people that we are where we are today.”

Inherenting the dream of creating a place to gather

2016 saw the opening of the Sasaki Farm Cafe, right across from the Azuma Sports Park. Their specialty of soft serve ice cream of Sasaki Farm’s milk, with its rich-yet-fresh taste is widely popular, regardless of age or gender.

Managing the cafe is Mrs. Jun Koda (née Sasaki), Mitsuhiro Sasaki’s older sister. Surprisingly, Koda-san actually used to be an elementary school teacher for 24 years before opening up the cafe. Surely, her students must have been surprised when they learned their teacher suddenly became an ice-cream vendor!

There is a single, important reason for this change.

It was something Koda-san’s father said last year, while struggling against Parkinson’s disease.

“I want to create a place where people can come together. Rural towns lack places for people to gather. Every year, 1,5 million people visit the Azuma Sports Park, but nobody stops at the farming town that’s only a short ways away. I want to do something for that town,” is what her father started saying regularly.  The fact that, despite his loss of mobility, her father went out of his way to visit city hall in order to make his case, for the benefit of the local area, is something that is deeply etched in Koda-san’s memory.

Seeing her father’s plight, her first thought of “Who’s gonna actually do that?,” soon changed into “Me, of course. I’m the only who could.”

From then on, she became singly focused on opening up the cafe, with a sense of self-confidence not-yet-backed by experience. Her character trait of starting right away when she sets her mind on something – and only figuring out how along the way – is something she probably inherited from her father, as she herself shyly admits.

The dream of Koda’s father took shape. It became a place where even on weekdays people come together in droves to enjoy a relaxing time on the foot of Mt. Azuma and the delicious soft serve ice cream.

Sadly, about 1 month before this interview Sasaki-san Sr. passed away. He wrote down all of his experiences in his personal memoirs. We really wanted for him to see FoodCamp for himself, but we are sure that he will be smiling down on us.

Days in Apulia, southern Italy

Aoyagi, a 10-seat Italian restaurant on a corner of the Fukushima City downtown area with room for about 10 people was first opened in 2013. Owner and chef Takuya Aoyagi has built up a significant fan-base with his exquisite dishes. One of his fans gushes, “Every single one of his dishes tells a story, and tasting it is like taking a little trip somewhere.” According to another, “Aoyagi-san’s dishes are like art, and the plate is the canvas.”

When we ask him whether this high praise is thanks to having received trained in a well-known restaurant or something, he responds with modesty: “No, no, I didn’t work at some famous place at all. As for training, all I did was spend some time in the Apulia region of Italy.”

Growing up in Fukushima City, as a high school student he played soccer. Likely because of the influence of his father being a chef, he started working in the kitchen of a restaurant after graduating high school. Having developed an interest in Italy, he looked for restaurants where he could work while living-in, and just happened to stumble on the Apulia region. At Aoyagi, a cookbook of Apulian cuisine is inconspicuously on display. Undoubtedly, this is where we can track his career back to.

Meeting Sasaki-san

When he opened his restaurant, he never had milk on his mind. He knew about Sasaki Farm, but had not considered using their products in his restaurant. But when he first heard about the Sasaki Farm’s cafe-plans, and that he could get their milk delivered straight to his restaurant, he started using their services. This was in 2015.

At Aoyagi, many local products from Fukushima City and the surrounding areas, Fukushima Prefecture, and the surrounding prefectures are used in abundance. To be fair, most of the products used are local. When asked for a reason, he responds, “When you use local products, you get to know the people you deal with, they have a lot to teach, and there’s a sense of security and trust that you wouldn’t get elsewhere.”

“I think he’s a real craftsman,” Aoyagi-san says when asked about Sasaki-san. This is likely because of all of his considered, careful efforts towards quality, and the faith in his own way of doing things as a producer. He instantly noticed a different reaction among his customers when he started using Sasaki Farm’s milk.

“One day, I started serving gelato made from Sasaki Farm’s milk. The customers reacted totally differently.”

When using high-quality products, people can tell the difference best when they’re served simply. That must be how customers can best appreciate the quality.

“If you don’t have the ingredients, why open up?”

The development of Chef Aoyagi’s stance towards cuisine must be thanks to this experience. When we tried to reserve a table for lunch, we learned that the restaurant had been temporarily closed recently, and he opened up shop just for the occasion. When asked why he was temporarily closed, he simply states that its off-season for the vegetables, and just doesn’t have the ingredients he wants. “If you can’t get the ingredients, why even bother opening up shop?” He really is calm and grounded to the core.

You can prepare any kind of cuisine with produce from Fukushima, and the quality is some of the highest in the country. That is why Chef Aoyagi doesn’t make a big deal about lofty goals like local produce, local consumption, but simply uses local products because they happen to be high quality.

In the end, he really wants producers to have a taste of their own products through his cuisine. At the upcoming FoodCamp, he will get his way. This will be another chance to strengthen the bonds of trust with his producers. We are convinced that this will be a very special, early-summer, late-afternoon dinner.