Cheese: Later Developments: Growth and the Small Farmer

For many years, the small dairies producing farmstead cheeses in the United States found a limited market. While this is still somewhat true in the early 2000s, certain trends have emerged that will facilitate the growth of these products and enable them to secure a larger role in American foodways. The first of these trends is the prevalence of small farmers who want to make these cheeses. Where once a handful of (mostly) entrepreneurial women produced small quantities of fresh goat cheese, which was often sold at local markets or found in the new cuisine just beginning to emerge from the Bay Area in the 1970s, in the early 2000s there was an explosive growth in farmers who produced all varieties of goat, sheep, and cow milk cheeses and brought them to market in a number of ways. In 1993, the American Cheese Society, which holds an annual competition, received fewer than a hundred submissions in all categories; in 2003, the number reached over seven hundred submissions from virtually every region of the country.