Oser Communications Group

BY LORRIE BAUMANN When Stacie Ballard married her husband in 1980, the Los Angeles-born-and-raised woman wasn't planning to make the same life her new husband had envisioned. "He said, 'I want to be a dairy farmer.' I said I wanted to live in Hawaii." Only one of those things happened, and today, Stacie Ballard is a Farmer and Owner of Ballard Family Dairy & Cheese in Gooding, Idaho. "He always wanted to have a dairy farm – his uncle was an Idaho dairy farmer," she said. "He brought me here on my honeymoon." The couple moved to their Idaho farm in 1993, and Ballard pitched in on her husband's dream. "I went down the street to the dairy farmer and asked if they'd teach me to milk cows," she said. "I told him I'd work for free." Together, the two of them built a barn, bought equipment, bought 25 registered Jersey cows and started milking in 1995. After almost another decade, Ballard's husband quit his off-farm job to become a full-time dairy farmer, and the couple decided that, if they were going to continue making a go of it, they needed to look into a value- added product. He took a cheesemaking class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and came back home to propose to Ballard that they should make cheese, especially since the local cheese plant had just been bought out by a larger competitor and shut down. "There wasn't going to be any cheese curds in the valley any more, so we said we'd make cheese curds," Ballard said. The two of them took another cheesemaking course at the University of Wisconsin and opened a cheese plant on their farm in 2004. Today, their son Travis Ballard and grandson Matthew Floyd are the Cheesemakers at Ballard Family Dairy & Cheese and their cheeses are winning prizes in Idaho Milk Processors Association competitions. The family is milking around 120 registered Jerseys twice a day on their 50-acre farm and selling cheeses into the regional foodservice and grocery retail channels. "It's not Hawaii, but I have all my kids real close," Ballard said. "All my kids live right here within a 4-mile radius, and all my grandchildren, so it works." The newest cheese from Ballard Family Dairy & Cheese is Black Pepper Cheddar, which won a first place award in its farmstead class and a second runner-up overall this year at the Idaho Milk Processors Competition. "We've won first on all of our cheeses at one time or another," Ballard said. All of the family's cheeses are hand-made in small batches, and all the milk in them comes from the Ballards' Jersey herd. Idaho Grilling Cheese, the Ballards' halloumi-style cheese, is a best seller for the company in the foodservice market. "It's really an up-and-comer," Ballard said. "A lot of chefs are getting interested in it.... We have a chef in Florida who orders it once a year for a competition." Danish Pearl Gouda started out as a Danish-style recipe, but with some help from a consultant, Travis Ballard has tweaked it into a Gouda-style cheese. The name, though, stuck. Jersey Dream is the Ballards' feta, which won a silver award at the World Jersey Cheese Awards a few years ago. The cheese's name reflects the Jersey cows who contributed the milk, and "My son says it tastes like a dream," Ballard said. "Travis – he's my namer." The company also makes Baby Swiss that's aged for three months and Idaho White Cheddar that's usually sold after four months of aging. "We just can't make it fast enough," Ballard said. "With all of our cheddars, we like that four months. Every once in a while we do a 1- or 2-year-old that we sell as 'Aged,' but we don't have enough of that. We always run out at Christmas time." 10 The Cheese Guide cheese the farmer takes a wife and the stands alone

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