Farmers look to artisanal cheeses

Fancy products boost lagging dairy industry as milk prices decline

Scrolling through Instagram, Scott Schroeder sees a picture of Sue Miller posing for a selfie with a block of cheese.

Not too long after, that cheese — handmade and aged in Ms. Miller’s creamery in Chester County, Pa. — has traveled an hour east into Philadelphia, ending up at Mr. Schroeder’s Queen Village restaurant, Hungry Pigeon.

There, the cheese is carved up and served at the rustic, exposedbrick eatery where Mr. Schroeder is the owner and chef. One order of cheese is $7. Five is $25. Pricier than Kraft singles? For sure.

But the sale of fancier cheeses, according to both farmers and artisanal cheesemakers, has partially offset dipping milk prices in Pennsylvania’s languishing dairy industry and provided some dairy farmers and cheesemakers with the option to transform an increasingly invaluable commodity into one for which restaurateurs and consumers are willing to pay a premium.

“We’re talking about making cheeses that are highly specialized, very unique and hard to find on the market,” said Ms. Miller, owner and operator of the Chester Springs-based Birchrun Hills Farm, home to a cheesemaking

facility and a herd of about 80 cows that she milks to make her cheeses.

With the help of her family, Ms. Miller, 52, makes a naturally rinded blue cheese using raw milk called “Birchrun Blue.”

Also lining the shelves of her 800-square-foot creamery is an alpine cheese she’s named “Equinox,” an American farmhouse-style raw milk cheese named “Fat Cat,” and a washedrind cheese dubbed “Red Cat.” She calls it “a little, stinky cheese.”

Ms. Miller, president of the Pennsylvania Cheese Guild, considers herself to be one of the fortunate dairy farmers.

Not only has her dairy farm stood up so far to mounting industry financial pressures, but she has able to produce cheese because she has space to make it, she said.

She currently leases her cheesemaking facility from a nearby farm but is awaiting a permit to open a 4,800square-foot cheese production space on her own farm. Not all dairy farmers have those resources, especially when it generally costs between $400,000 to $600,000 to build a creamery, she said.

“It’s a huge upfront investment in many cases,” said Sherry Bunting, a Lancaster County-based agricultural writer for 35 years.

As it stands, most milk production isn’t a booming source of revenue. Farmers in southeastern Pennsylvania are currently paid around $15 per 100 pounds of milk, Ms. Miller said, or $13 for 100 pounds on the commodity market. The average price for 100 pounds of milk in Pennsylvania is around $17, she said.

“Part of the issue is that there’s a lot of milk being made nationally and there’s also a lot of consolidation happening,” Ms. Bunting said. “Milk is moving into different parts of the country. … And there is — and has been until now — an oversupply of milk.”

With greater production, Ms. Bunting said the U.S. has increased its global exports of milk, which has lowered revenue for American farms.

“The lower that it goes, the more we can export because it makes us more globally competitive,” Ms. Bunting said. “That’s fine, but we haven’t figured out how to compensate farmers.”

In addition, the number of cow-milk drinkers is dwindling, Ms. Miller said, with more consumers choosing to buy plant-based “milks.”

“That’s why these farms are burning through their equity,” she said. “They can’t carry through these losses.”

And so, for some dairy enthusiasts, fancy cheese is the way to go.