The (New) States for Cheese - Cheese Course

Over the past five years, the local food movement has helped spur the production of local artisanal cheeses in non-traditional dairy states, such as Nebraska, Illinois and Georgia. Although Vermont, California and Wisconsin remain cheesemaking hubs, other states are beginning to lead the way with farmstead cheeses like Little Bloom on the Prairie from Illinois, Georgia's Green Hill and Nebraska's Lancaster Duet.

Leslie Cooperband from Prairie Fruits Farm in Illinois and Charuth Loth from Farmstead First in Nebraska are both diversifying their farms and selling cheeses directly to customers at local markets.

"The perception of consumers is changing," Loth says. "People are starved for a connection with the farm." Loth and her fellow co-owner Krista Dittman laughed, saying that they feel they're engaging in "rural counseling" -- helping to reestablish a lost connection between food and the earth.

"Folks are literally and figuratively hungry for handcrafted local foods," Cooperband says. "It amazes me how our customers only four years ago had barely tasted goat cheese, and now they are asking for the runny bloomy rind cheeses."

But cheese innovation in non-traditional dairy states comes with several challenges, including the lack of an infrastructure and knowledge base.

"Unfortunately Texas does not have a Dairy Board that promotes our cheeses, as exists in states such a Wisconsin, California and the New England states," says Paula Lambert, a veteran cheesemaker and owner of the Mozzarella Company.

One of the biggest difficulties for cheesemakers in such states is simply getting started. When Loth went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) to take out a grant, she initially received nothing but discouragement from people who did not understand a business plan that did not include large-scale wholesale or commodities.

"Dairy inspectors only had experience working with giant dairy factories and did not understand the smaller model," Loth says. After a lot of perseverance and research on smaller dairies in states like Vermont, UNL not only began to understand the small-scale artisanal dairy, but began to use Loth and Dittman as experts.

"One of the biggest challenges was that there were no examples of farmstead cheese producers in Illinois that we could turn to for advice on infrastructure -- the [design of our] aging rooms, for example," says Cooperband about the initial dairy setup at Prairie Fruits Farm.

Another challenge was finding people who understood the cheese operation well enough to properly install the equipment. "Not having other small scale, artisan or farmstead cheese producers to talk to close by was and still is a large disadvantage," Cooperband says. "A lot of times, I feel like I am in a vacuum when we encounter problems."

Despite these issues, small diversified farms that sell a variety of products from produce to dairy, like Cooperband's and Loth's, may well be the way of the future for American agriculture. Loth explains that larger factory-style dairy plants are shutting down throughout Nebraska because there are simply not enough of them to make it worthwhile for distributors to purchase their milk. She posits that a diversified farm not dependent upon large companies purchasing their milk can be much more sustainable from a purely business perspective.

These small-scale dairies have managed to go against the grain to become small fiscal success stories, however, probably in part because of the local food movement.

"Over the past two to three years, membership in the American Cheese Society has been swelling from non-traditional dairy states," says Greg O'Neil, co-owner (along with Ken Miller) of Chicago's Pastoral cheese shop, which carries several farmstead cheeses from non-traditional cheesemaking states in the Midwest.

Such developments give us hope that folks in states nationwide can, in fact, "say cheese."