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8 The Cheese Guide stops at their farm. "Farmers used to be able to make a living selling to a co-op and getting a fair price," Jarred said. "These past few years have just wiped dairy farmers out." Farmers with small herds, like the Boyces, who are trying to remain dairy farmers and keep their herds small enough that their family can manage the farm work with minimal outside help have found only one way to avoid the crushing economics of this situation – if Americans won't buy their milk in a form that can be poured over cold cereal or into a glass, the farmers will sell it to them in a form that consumers are willing to pay more for. For some dairy farmers, that means making butter or ice cream; the Boyces bought Chapel's Country Creamery in 2017 and are learning how to make cheese. Making that plan work over the long term means that they have to make good cheese – cheese for which Americans will pay a premium price. To help them do that, the Boyces have enlisted veteran cheesemaker Kelly Harding, who was working at Chapel's Country Creamery when the Boyces bought it, advice from the other cheesemakers and cheese experts who are members of the American Cheese Society and a little consumer expertise from their son Trace, who, at two years old, is already a bit of a cheese connoisseur – his favorites are the brie and blue cheeses that his parents make. "He's our cheese expert. He knows what's good," Jarred said. "He'll tell you if you BY LORRIE BAUMANN Jarred and Trisha Boyce fell in love and got married six years ago with the idea that they'd be dairy farmers together. There was just one problem – and it had a dollar sign in front of it. Neither they nor anyone they knew could figure out how to make a living by raising cows and selling the milk. It wasn't that they didn't know what they were doing in a dairy – Trisha is a third-generation dairy farmer who's lived on a farm and worked with cows her whole life; Jarred's been working with cows ever since he was 15 years old. "We'd been milking cows our whole lives," Jarred said. The problem was – and is – the American dairy market. Americans just aren't buying milk the way they used to – dairy consumption has been falling steadily for decades, and there's no sign of a turnaround any time soon. "There's really no future in the dairy industry – it's kind of bleak," Trisha said. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American consumed about 28.7 gallons of milk in 1975. By 2018, the average American consumed just under 17 gallons of fluid milk. That declining demand combined with dairy farmers' increasing efficiency has created a glut of milk on the American market, and the law of supply and demand has taken over – many dairy farmers today are selling their milk for less than it costs them to care for the cows that make it, which means that they're losing money every time the milk truck from the co-op HOPES DREAMS CHEESEMAKING on Maryland's Eastern Shore

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