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14 The Cheese Guide BY LORRIE BAUMANN Green Dirt Farm was born of Sarah Hoffmann's desire to give her children the kind of grounded life that her parents provided for her on the various farms to which her family moved as her father's duty assignments as a pilot for the U.S. Navy took him from place to place. "We moved every two years, but wherever we moved, we lived on a small farm," says Hoffmann, who is the Proprietor at Green Dirt Farm today. "My dad did the work when he got home from work." Even today, Hoffmann's father, John Hoffmann, though at 83, long since retired from his Naval career, still maintains draft horses. "My dad, we always teased him that he was a closet farmer, but he's not a closet farmer – he's a farmer at heart," Sarah Hoffmann says. "He grew up loving the farm, and he communicated that to his kids." Her experience of growing up on various kinds of farms, from simple family subsistence-style farms with vegetable gardens and a few animals to more robust kinds of farming operations, gave her both knowledge of a wide range of farming styles and an enduring desire to raise her own family on a farm even after she grew up and went her own way with a career in medicine. She met her husband while they were in medical school together in San Francisco, pursued her residency in internal medicine while he completed a residency in cardiology as well as a masters degree in public health and then fellowships to prepare for an academic career. When he finished his fellowship, he realized that the family would have to move so he could teach, since universities rarely hire their professors from the ranks of those who've trained in their institution. Hoffmann took that move as a chance to exercise her dream of living on a farm so that her children could have the experience of spending time outdoors, of seeing the cycle of life and death, of knowing that hard work can be challenging, but it's also very rewarding. "I said to him, 'Here's the deal, this is what we're going to do,' " she says, " 'Target academic medical centers within 30 miles of affordable farmland.' " There weren't many of those, since major teaching hospitals tend to be located in the heart of a big city. Kansas City, Missouri, had one of the five hospitals that filled the bill. "When we got here, they offered us both fantastic jobs, and when we looked around, we said, 'Good farmland. This is where we're coming,' " she says. "I had actually never lived in the Midwest." They found the farm they'd been seeking in Weston, Missouri, a rural town of about 1,500 people that's close to Kansas City and started a grass-based sheep dairy with the intention that eventually they'd be a farmstead cheese operation. Hoffmann spent the six years from 2002 to 2008 getting the farm set up and learning how to make cheese, then started making cheese for commercial sale in 2008. It was a role for which her education in chemistry, biology and medicine stood her in good stead, since cheesemaking is largely a matter of chemistry and microbiology, she says. Of course, commercial cheesemaking isn't just a matter of chemistry and biology – there's still the commercial part of it. "We still needed to reach that goal of economic sustainability," she says. Hoffmann's not the first to discover that it's extremely difficult to make a living in the U.S. with sheep milk cheeses, even if the cheeses are really good, even if they're winning prizes in competitions. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from considerations of international trade to the complexities of ovine biology to market forces in the American economy. Her solution to the problem was to form partnerships with nearby Amish dairies who were raising sheep and cows. They agreed both to sell her their milk but also to follow her rules about how they raised their animals. "Those dairies promised to uphold all the same farm practices we think are very important for producing great cheese," Hoffmann says. Those farm practices include raising the animals on pasture and that they be Animal Welfare Approved by A Greener World. "We think that's really important because there's a lot of research that shows that a diverse grass diet will concentrate a lot more flavor compounds in the milk," Hoffmann says. "We think it's important to have a third-party come in and validate that our farm practices are both humane and environmentally 14 The Cheese Guide from the PrairyErth: Green Dirt Farm cheeses

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