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8 The Cheese Guide moving back from Seattle to Bandon – he'd also been making cheese – just about three hours down the highway at Rogue Creamery's cheddar plant. David Gremmels, President of Rogue Creamery, and Joe Sinko were old friends, sharing both their interests in cheese and in furniture-making. So when Brad needed a place to make some cheese to get Beecher's started, Gremmels had offered up Rogue Creamery's cheddar facilities. And when Brad needed a place to make some cheese to get Face Rock Creamery started, he did it again. The milk for that cheese came down the highway from Bob Scolari's Milk-E-Way Dairy farm in the Coquille Valley, the farm that still supplies most of Face Rock Creamery's milk today. That matters, according to research conducted at Oregon State University and reported in the Journal of Dairy Science in 2016 and the Journal of Advances in Dairy Research in 2018. The OSU food scientists asked consumers to taste cheddar cheese samples made from milk produced at various places around Oregon. They wanted to find out if terroir, the idea that food products have flavors that are characteristic of the place where they were made, actually matters, or if it's just another term that marketers use because it's French and makes the food seem more elegant than it actually is. According to Goddik, one of the authors of those papers, they found that consumers were able to distinguish between cheeses from milk that came from different farms, particularly when the cheddars were young and when the farms had some distance between them. According to the 2016 paper, consumers were able to distinguish between 5-month cheddars that came from milk originating from different farms within the same region. But when the milk came from neighboring farms, they grouped those cheeses together. With 9-month cheddars, though, consumers could tell the difference between the raw milk cheeses and the cheeses made from pasteurized milk, but they had a harder time distinguishing cheeses made from the milk from different farms. "These data suggest that the geographical location of the milk source has an effect on the flavor of Cheddar cheese," the scientists concluded. A company like Face Rock Creamery that's making a national reputation for its award-winning cheeses is therefore heavily dependent on the stability of its milk supply. And in Face Rock's case, that means it's particularly dependent on Bob Scolari and his ability to keep his dairy in business at a time when Oregon, like other dairy-producing states, is rapidly losing its dairy farmers. According to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the latest, U.S. has just over 2 million farms with a total of just over 900 million acres producing a total value of just under $400 billion a year in agricultural products, including crops, livestock, meat, fish, fur, eggs and milk. Of those 2 million farms, just under 55,000 had milk cows, compared to 64,098 farms in 2012. Bob Scolari's Milk-E-Way Dairy is one of the 228 licensed Grade A dairy farms remaining in Oregon. He's a third- generation dairy farmer who milks 150 cows in a mixed herd of Holsteins, Jerseys and Brown Swiss. Most are Holsteins, which produce more milk than the other breeds, but the higher butterfat that's characteristic of Jerseys provides an average butterfat percentage that meets Face Rock's needs for the milk that makes its cheddars. At 150 cows, Scolari's Milk-E-Way Farm is a smallish dairy farm – the typical Oregon dairy has between 350 and 400 milking cows on a 300-acre farm, according to the Oregon Dairy and Nutrition Council. The Milk-E-Way farm was started 94 years ago by Scolari's grandfather, who emigrated from Switzerland in 1908, went to California and then worked his way up the coast until he arrived in the Coquille Valley in southwestern Oregon. His father, Leonard, added to it by buying out some of his neighbors as they retired or went bust, so it now encompasses about 1,000 acres, of which 300 acres is bottom land that he uses as pasture. Some of the rest of it is timbered with trees that Bob cuts down for logs when dairy farming alone doesn't pay all the bills. "If you have everything paid for, you should be able to make a living at it, but some days it doesn't work like that," he said. One of Bob's earliest memories is trotting down the road alongside his mother to milk the 20 cows that his father had acquired along with the farm under them. The family car had broken down, and for the few days it took to get it running again, Bob and his mom walked the three-quarters of a mile between home and the farm where those cows needed to be milked twice a day. "I think I was in kindergarten the first time I started bringing Milk-E-Way cows in pasture

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