By Motoko Rich
As a fourth-generation cheesemaker from the Puglia region in Italy’s boot, Angelantonio Tafuno sounds in many ways like just another millennial trying to slow down in a frenetic world.
On a recent fall afternoon, Mr. Tafuno, 32, preached a more languid lifestyle for farmers and cheesemakers who “are running a little too much.” His goal, he said, was to churn out fewer bulbs of the handmade burrata and mozzarella that his family has been making for decades, while developing specialty aged cheeses that he can produce for just a few months of the year. Behind him, a herd of Podolica cows, a breed of cattle that produces less milk than typical dairy cows, pounded toward a wooded grove to graze for the afternoon.
But for Mr. Tafuno, who invested in 30 head of the Podolica two years ago, the effort to develop new artisanal formulations represents more than a desire to create a gentler farm-to-table life. Doing more with less has become necessary as climate change endangers his family’s business. Extreme temperatures in Italy linked to global warming have not only contributed to dire droughts and catastrophic fires, they have also caused cows to produce less milk.
In Puglia — which produces a majority of Italy’s famed creamy-centered burrata — cheesemakers are trying to adapt to a diminishing supply of their key raw ingredient. For Mr. Tafuno, developing cheese varieties that require less milk “is a way to face what is happening now with climate change.”
He knows what is happening because he can feel it. He spends several mornings a week with his hands sunk deep in metal tubs of curd and whey, stirring with a large beechwood paddle to transform the consistency to taffylike lumps that he stretches and folds and ties into knots. Working with his hands, he said, he can detect whether the milk has come from stressed cows because it is thinner and takes longer to curdle. These days, he said, he feels declines in the milk’s quality more and more often.
The science backs him up. Depending on their sensitivity to heat and humidity and how high temperatures rise, cows’ milk production can drop anywhere from 3 percent to as much as 20 percent, said Umberto Bernabucci, a professor at the University of Tuscia who studies cow physiology. Other studies show that heat and humidity can cut milk yields by as much as 30 percent. Heat also degrades protein and fat levels in milk, which directly affect the quality of cheese.
According to an analysis of government data by CLAL, a dairy industry research center based in Modena, in northern Italy, milk production from cows throughout Italy has been declining because of the heat in the summer months. From 2022 to 2024, milk production dropped an average of 17.2 percent between March and September, more than an average drop of 15.5 percent during those same months in the previous three years.
Dairy farmers operate on thin margins, so it does not take a drastic decrease to create what Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, calls “a milk apocalypse.”