Many professionals are changing careers to head back to the land and to become small scale dairy farmers. I tried this myself four years ago when I went to work and live on a brand new dairy farm. I was the assistant to an ex-computer engineer who had become a full time artisinal cheese maker. Herding and milking the cows, brewing beer, making cheese, baking bread, feeding the chickens, haying, and driving a tractor. You're outside in the hot summer sun and five degree wintry days, building things and tearing down others, up at dawn and working past dusk. At least you have the fringe benefits of making fine food products; eating all you make, trading your goods with others in the food community, and going to fun and fancy food events. It's a tough life where you never stop moving, but one that is becoming more rewarding than just a few years ago.
Small dairy farms are located all over the country, many in places you would think like Wisconsin and California, but also all over New England, the Mid-West, and the Pacific Northwest. Anywhere you can find a decent piece of farm land where your milk producing, four legged friends can thrive. The farm where I lived and worked for a few months straddled the NY/NJ border, just a half hour from NYC, and in the middle of a bedroom community for many of those professionals who are thinking about second careers.
Cheese is big time nowadays, with the growth of specialty cheese five times that of regular cheese. Artisinal, farm made, handcrafted, small batch, raw milk, grass fed, pasture raised, happy cows, goats, and sheep. These are just some of the buzz words in the new American cheese lexicon, and they are what people are asking their cheese mongers to provide. These cheeses are great, able to compete with the finest of Europe, and getting rave reviews. Go into a cheese specialty shop some time and ask to see and try just the ones made in the US and you will be amazed at the number and variety. If your 're lucky and the cheese purveyor knows their stuff, they will also tell you a bit about the cheese-maker them self, since they all have great stories about how they came to be dairy farmers and what they do that makes their cheese so special.
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