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The Cheese Guide 9 cows in from the field," he said. "That was before four-wheelers and motorcycles. Those things make it a lot easier." At 58 years old – about the average age for a principal farmer in this country, neither Bob nor his father currently has any plans to retire. Leonard is 86 now, one of almost 400,000 American farmers who are at least 75 years old, and he's still milking cows with Bob seven days a week. The milking parlor will accommodate 30 cows at a time, and Bob has it equipped with elevated lanes and a quick- release bar that simplifies the cows' path through the process enough to make it possible for his dad to do the milking as long as he wants to. Bob also has four sons, and he's hoping that at least one of them will follow him into the dairy business. His two oldest have already chosen different career paths, but Bob has his hopes pinned now on the 14-year-old. "I've got two more to go. We'll see," he said. "If you don't love it, better not do it. It's a seven-day- a-week job.... People don't realize how cheap the food is in this country. Farmers don't make a lot at it. They love what they're doing." Leonard tells Bob that when he was a kid, there were maybe 400 dairies in the Coquille Valley. "Everybody kept a couple cows," he said. The valley offers good pasture land and moderate temperatures that mean that the cows can stay out on the grass for most of the year instead of living in the barn and eating expensive hay. "Grass makes you money," Bob said. He himself can remember back about 50 years, when there were over 100 dairies in the Coquille Valley. Now there are nine, he says, of which eight have turned to organic production to survive. Milk-E-Way is the only conventional dairy left in the valley. That has only been possible because Face Rock Creamery was ready to buy conventional milk just at the time when there was no local market for conventional milk left – sheer survival in the dairy business would have required him to convert to organic production, as his neighbors already had. All of Bob's milk has gone to Face Rock since just before the creamery opened. "They opened in May. We started shipping in April," he said. Bob's brother trucked that April milk down the highway to Rogue Creamery, where David Gremmels became a dairy farmer as well as a cheesemaker in 2015 after he became aware that Dairy Farmer Delmer Brink, who'd been selling him milk since he'd acquired Rogue Creamery in 2002, was getting ready to retire. With average milk prices to U.S. farmers plummeting from $25.70 per hundredweight in September 2014 to $16.80 per hundredweight in February 2015 and no improvement in sight, a lot of Brink's neighbors were making retirement plans as well. Gremmels was worried about maintaining a reliable milk supply for Rogue Creamery cheeses. "I didn't feel like I had a choice," he said. Gremmels bought one of those neighboring farms and set about improving it into a state-of-the art organic dairy with robotic milkers, a new loafing barn, solar power equipment and pasture rehabilitation. The changes were motivated by devotion to both his cows' comfort and the health of the pasture and deep sensitivity to the potential environmental impacts of a dairy farm that borders the scenic Rogue River. The results have included organic certification from Oregon Tilth and Animal Welfare certification. B Lab has recognized Rogue Creamery as "Best for the World" for the past three years running. Best for the World status indicates B Lab's top rank for businesses that the nonprofit organization has already certified as making positive impacts for both people and planet. Rogue Creamery registered as an Oregon Benefit Corporation on January 2, 2014, on the very first day that a new Oregon law allowed companies to build social responsibility into their bylaws. The company's mission statement is that Rogue Creamery is "People dedicated to sustainability, service, and the art and tradition of creating the world's finest handmade cheese," and David Gremmels makes a point of saying that out loud whenever he has an opening. Zach Rose has heard Gremmels say it more than once. A seventh- generation member of a Virginia dairy-farming family who grew up working on the farm where his family milks 250 cows, he's the 27- year-old Dairy Farm Manager who's in charge of executing that vision every day on the Rogue Creamery farm. "I knew from the time I was five or six years old that I loved the cows," he said. "I wanted to be with the cows, and I didn't want to do anything else with my life." With his birth family prolific about generating farmers from one generation to the next and declining market demand for fluid milk Zach Rose

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