Former professionals start second careers in specialty cheese industry

If curds and whey sound better than corporate ladder climbing, get in line.\nScores of lawyers, engineers and other professionals with back-to-the-land yearnings and a love of good food are taking advantage of a booming market for specialty cheeses, launching second careers as small-scale dairy farmers.\nIt's a move they'd have been crazy to make just a few years ago. Never mind the long hours and backbreaking labor. Abysmal milk prices have been hurting family dairies for years, and the corporatization of the dairy world creates tough terrain for small-time operations.\nBut the era of so-called artisanal cheeses -- which are to processed cheese slices what Champagne is to soda pop -- has changed all that.\nJust as wine is nuanced by the "terroir" (geography) of the vineyard, these small-batch, hand-crafted cheeses from goat, sheep and cow milk telegraph flavors from the pastures and plants the animals grazed, making each one -- even each batch of each one -- distinct.\nAnd that has made them sought after staples of restaurant menus and dairy cases around the country, giving new life to a faltering industry and new jobs to those looking to trade meetings for milk.\n"I really enjoyed my former career," says John Putnam, a former lawyer who makes Alpine-style cows' milk cheeses on his Thistle Hill Farm in North Pomfret, Vt. "But I would say even in the early '90s, I was talking to other lawyers from a cell phone on a tractor."\nConsumption of specialty cheeses, a $6.4 billion industry in 2003, increased five times faster than overall cheese consumption from 1994 to 2004, according to a study by the California Milk Advisory Board. The agricultural community has taken notice.\nCheese-making hubs like Vermont and Pennsylvania have struggled for years to stem the loss of family dairy farms. Pennsylvania continues to lose them, but state agriculture officials say second-career producers are slowing the rate. In Vermont, they've helped bring it to a standstill.\nAnd in Wisconsin, production of specialty cheeses -- a broad category that includes artisanal cheeses and their close cousin, farmstead cheeses (which are made exclusively from milk produced onsite) -- more than doubled between 1994 and 2005.\nThat success marks the difference between selling milk as a commodity and using it to craft a product. Dairies that sell milk to processors earn a little more than a $1 per 10 pounds (more for organic). Turn that milk into fine cheese and the figure becomes $20 or more.\n"When they start doing the numbers they say, 'Hey! We just made $1,400 worth of cheese from $200 worth of commodity milk,'" Sandra Miller, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Farmstead & Artisan Cheese Alliance, says. "The light bulbs are going on."\nThough some artisan cheese makers buy milk, many prefer to milk their own animals. Such is the case with Miller, who six years ago left her career as a petroleum geologist to make chevre, feta and cultured butter on a Newburg, Penn., farm with a few goats and cows.\nShe credits the burgeoning opportunities for would-be cheese makers to the evolution of the American palate. Foreign travel and restaurants whose menus brag of artisanal products have shown people there is more to cheese than the yellow and white slices they grew up with.\n"Americans are finally getting it," Anita Eisenhauer, professor and executive chef at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., says. "They're getting what is so special about Italy and all those countries Americans want to visit."\nBut how do people schooled in legal briefs or binary code learn about Brie? Cheese school.\nIn recent years, a handful of private and university programs have grown out of the demand for cheese-making skills, including the Vermont Institute for Artisan Cheese at the University of Vermont's Burlington campus.