“So, when we bought the farm in 2007, the joke is, let's get a couple of milk goats, want to? And so, she got a couple of goats to milk, you know, she started making cheese with the milk. And everybody said you need to sell it. So, it kind of evolved from there.”
Barry Million and his wife Lesley own Terrell Creek Farm, 50 acres in Fordland, near the real Terrell Creek, where they raise goats, host an Airbnb and, most importantly, make cheese.
“We are not milking any of our goats right now,” Barry explained as he gave KSMU and OPT a tour of the farm. “We're buying most of our milk right now from another local family farm.”
Million said they did get up to 80 goats at one time, but caring for their herd and daily milking took their toll.
“Then someone has to go make cheese. Then we package cheese and then we have to market it. Deliver it. It was just untenable, you know, doing that much.”
The Millions decided to focus on cheese making and invest their efforts in a facility that would allow them to make more cheese and spend less time milking. In trendy ag terms, cheese is a value-added product — a product that transforms more or less raw ingredients into something more valuable than the sum of its parts. Organizations like the USDA and Missouri Farm Bureau have put an emphasis on value-added production in recent years. As the MU Extension put it in an article in April of this year: “Margins are tight. Input costs remain elevated. Commodity markets fluctuate. Expanding acreage is expensive, and adding scale is not always realistic.” A well-planned value-added business model allows a farmer to make more money with a relatively minimal investment in labor and equipment.
“Anybody that wants to invest in a facility that's going to pass the state Milk board regulations, anybody can go in and milk goats and put it in a bottle,” Million explained, “the value-added part for us is making it into a product that people need and want.”
And while Million said they got off to a slow start introducing goat cheese to the palates of people in the Ozarks, they’ve found it is a product people really do want.
“When we first started, we thought we'd be making just the plain, unflavored chevre. Everybody wanted to know, you know, in this area, they're not real familiar with goat cheese," he said. "They may have had it on a salad at a restaurant or something, but, they'd say, what do you do with it? So, we took some herbs and some garlic and mixed it in and sampled that out and say, here, this is what you can do with it. And they said, no, we want you to put that in a tub and sell it to us.”
So, that's what they’ve done, expanding into flavors and styles that appeal to a broader audience while still making more traditional style cheeses. Million said they’ve found markets in local farmers’ markets, stores and in regional restaurants as far away as Bentonville, Arkansas and Columbia, Missouri that are tapping into the popularity of farm-to-table ingredients. While Million said restaurants have mostly found them, the marketing they have done, going to places, giving out samples, can be time consuming. It's another reason they've shifted focus to the production side.
Clint Grounds is now the full-time cheese maker at Terrell Creek. He walked us through some of their cheese and the process to make them.
“We do a feta. We do some semi-hard cheeses similar to queso fresco. One is a farmer's cheese. We do another one with habanero and red pepper flakes. That's really spicy. I started last year as an experiment doing one with dill. It's done really well. We call it 'Farmer in the Dill,'" he said. "We've also started doing some cow milk cheeses as well. We do most of those seasonally during the fall and the winter. The goat milk production goes way down.”
He said Lesley Million taught him everything about raising goats and making cheese. Clint and Barry both describe Lesley as a regional goat expert. They say sharing direct knowledge and supporting others interested in farming and homesteading has been an important part of the farming community they’ve found themselves in. Grounds was drawn in by their efforts to open up and share.
“She offered a cheesemaking class,” Grounds explained. “I came down for the cheesemaking class one day and I was like, this is really cool. I like this, and then a few months later, she needed some help milking in the evenings and bottle-feeding babies.”
He said, at one point, he was working nearly 16 hour days, tending his own herd and helping out at Terrell. Now that Terrell Creek has shifted away from milking their own goats, Grounds can focus almost all of his effort on cheese making.
He described cheese making as part chess, part Tetris, an art and a science, that requires careful attention and specific actions at specific times but ultimately relies on the feel of the maker and the passion for their work.
“Everybody, you know, they're like, oh, you got such a cool job. You get to play with baby goats and make cheese all day," he said. "And I'm like, you have to love it or you can't do it. And I will just tell you, if you're not completely devoted to the goats and the cheese making, you just don't try it because it's just too much work.”
It’s work Grounds and the Millions are committed to, and that commitment goes into every bit of cheese at Terrell Creek as they continue to build upon what started as a few goats and an idea.
Nick Burasco and Dax Bedell provided production support for this story.
Find more in our Sense of Community series at this link, and view companion documentaries from Ozarks Public Television at OPTV.org.