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money to get into the business, and they decided to partner up. Weibel started looking for a cattle ranch. "After getting involved part time, learning about what we were doing and going through a holistic management course with Keith and Wendi, I decided I wanted to do it full time. I also felt that it was a good time to get out of the car business, economically," he says. "I realized that I could make a big difference in the health of my consumers, the people who generally could not afford to do this on their own (without being born into a farming family) and the environment (if the cattle are grazed properly)." After a while, though, it started eating away at him that you can't make beef without killing cows, and he didn't really want to be in the business of death. "I don't want to raise beef for slaughter," he says. "My goal is a world of life. No herbicides or pesticides." He and his wife, Blair, decided to go to Cal Poly and learn how to make cheese, and then they started thinking out their exit from the cattle ranching business. "I leased out the previous farm in 2010 to be purchased in 2013, so I thought, and found a small parcel of land outside of Steamboat Springs, to move my operation to," he says. "There used to be 70 or 80 dairies in the valley, but they shut down in the '70s when the ski areas grew." He settled in, started a herd that's now 27 milking cows, mostly Brown Swiss with some Guernsey and Jersey and a tiny bit of Angus for hardiness that helps them thrive at 7,000 feet in a climate that might bring a couple of months without rain in the summer and then frosts that bring grazing season to an early end. He built a milk house and started making cheese on a microscopic scale. "I wanted to make a cheese that was exported to France — it was that good," he says. He built a state-of-the-art creamery, and then he started coming to grips with the realization that trying to make a farmstead cheese as a one-man operation is a pretty good way to work yourself to death, even if you're only milking once a day. He put a two-line help wanted ad on the American Cheese Society's website and hoped for relief. Laura Chisholm answered the call. "She had a job lined up in Michigan, starting up a creamery for someone up there, and she'd had misgivings about it. She drove out and visited me the week before Thanksgiving and was working for me the week after Thanksgiving," he says. "It takes a team of two to five people. Two is too small, in my experience. It takes three to four people growing the grass, producing nutrient- dense foods for the herd, which produces nutrient-dense food for humans; then you have the cheesemaking, and you have marketing and distribution. ... I've done this so long that I'm at the point of exhaustion, but I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think we'll turn a profit this month."