A changed life. For Desiree Wehner (BSA ’81), who married her UGA ag school -sweetheart Al (BSA ’79) and accompanied him into the dairy business, that bite of -gorgonzola during a business trip to Milan might as well have been Proust’s madeleine for the long journey it launched. But it wasn’t based on memories of cheeses past-—Desiree says it was the first time she and her conventionally trained husband realized cheese wasn’t just “the stuff you peeled from a plastic envelope.” No, that bite of pungent blue sent the Wehners—and, as it happens, the South’s budding farmstead and artisanal cheese-making industry—into an entirely altered future.

The Wehners’ cheeses, produced at Sweet Grass Dairy in Thomasville and featured at top Atlanta restaurants such as Bacchanalia, Seeger’s, Ritz-Carlton, and Four Seasons, are now sold in 12 states and continue to win awards as they have since the first year Desiree entered them in competition. Recently, they earned first place in the American Cheese Society awards for farmstead cheese, and second place among 55 Southern cheeses at the Southern Foodways Alliance at Ole Miss’ Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

“They are a world-class dairy,” said cheese consultant Raymond Hook in 2003, after introducing Atlanta to Sweet Grass’ cheeses when he was buyer for Bacchanalia’s gourmet market. The cheeses from Sweet Grass’ small dairy (140 acres, 110 goats, with cow’s milk cheeses from the Wehners’ nearby Green Hill Dairy) more than doubled its sales volume each year in its first three years. Hook believes the Wehners’ “contribution to society is so much more than just cheese. It’s a clean, wholesome product, wrapped in local wax myrtle leaves or Georgia pecans. It’s unlike most dairies, which allow no natural -breeding cycles, and where the animals are pretty much four-legged milk machines. They’re -basically milked until they collapse.”

The Wehners recently sold their remarkably successful cheesemaking enterprise to their daughter and son-in-law, who will continue cheesemaking according to Desiree’s “recipes.” But the Wehners are not retiring. Far from it. They’re now focusing their efforts on a nearby 500-cow dairy called Green Hill and continuing to pioneer New Zealand-style “rotational grazing” and sustainable agriculture in South Georgia. (They plan to open another, similar-sized dairy near Green Hill soon.) It’s a long, long way from the farming they were trained for, and from the agribusiness-centric farming methods of the vast majority of their neighbors.

UGA agriculture professor Julia Gaskin, who serves as coordinator for the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Professional Development Program, says that although New Zealand-style farming is still in its infancy in Georgia, “we need all our tools in our toolbox to make farms more profitable. Eco--diversity is the key to helping decimated farming communities bounce back. At this point, it’s not a replacement, or even much competition [to conventional farms], but a respectable niche market.” Although more sustainable agriculture techniques have been incorporated into the curriculum at UGA—and certainly more than in the Wehners’ academic career—Gaskin acknowledges that most courses still teach traditional American high-investment, high-yield methods.

For the Wehners, who began their careers using those techniques, such as “triple-cropping” the land and raising cows on concrete, the reversal was immediate, and total. As they’d been taught, says Desiree, they viewed the soil as “an anchor” for grass: “Whatever you needed you could add with chemicals or fertilizer.” But their cows would stand “belly-deep in this beautiful pasture, bellowing with hunger,” says Desiree. A consultant told them that the grass looked good but didn’t contain the nutrients the cows needed. The two began to rethink their farming enterprise from the ground up. They focused on organic methods of mineralizing the soil, which led them to the New Zealand method of allowing earth, animals and humans seasons of rest.

“We went from a very intensely managed, conventional dairy farm that day to throwing it all away and going 180 degrees the other way,” she says. “We still fight the earth to get something back into it, but we’ve been very pleased. It took about eight years before Green Hill was on the right track.”

Their decision was based in part on their ambition for a better lifestyle. “From the conventional measure, we were very successful and profitable,” Desiree says of their farm before the change. “We had the highest rolling herd average, the highest milk production per cow average. We had a large capital outlay. We had 600 cows, living on concrete, feeding them mixed rations, in a high-input way to get the most out of the cows. At the same time, we had three kids, and we were missing their lives.” The Wehners realized if they continued on this path, they’d soon be required to buy outbuildings and equipment that would mean significant long-term debt.

Raised in western New York -between Niagara Falls and Rochester, Al Wehner had grown up on a dairy farm. It was his remembrance of things past, of pre-agribusiness dairying, that set them thinking; he recalled putting the heifers and “dry cows” out in summer. Sustainable agriculture techniques and rotational grazing were “starting to be a possibility up north for saving the small farm,” says Desiree.

New Zealand-style farming sprang from that country’s economic necessity. There, the high cost of grain, outbuildings and energy prohibit American-style high-yield farms. But the temperate climate allows New Zealand cows to graze nearly year-round (much like South Georgia). To compete in the world market, New Zealand farmers concentrate on the quality of their milk instead of quantity. This means farmers have to invest less and are “capturing more for themselves” of the profit, says Julie Gaskin. Still, because yields are lower, overall profits are lower too.

Both of the Wehners’ sons, Kyle and Clay, went to New Zealand to study farming techniques. In an e-mail from Massey University in Palmerston, 22-year-old Kyle describes the differences he found:

“New Zealand farmers invest tremendous dollars into the land, an appreciable investment, whereas U.S. conventional farmers invest heavily in highly depreciable freestall barns, grain storage and mixing facilities and the like. …Essentially, New Zealand pastoral systems are far superior to U.S. conventional farming in every way except the level of production. A U.S. dairy will produce significantly more liters of milk per cow per year. Basically, U.S. cows produce more water in their milk and less goodness. In New Zealand, farmers actually get charged extra for having too much water in their milk.”

“Conventional dairying requires a lot of time, but you’re not accomplishing much,” says Desiree. “You’re spinning wheels, like a factory. I don’t think a lot of dairy people would switch because it requires a different model and mindset. If we had to go back, we’d quit.”

Today, goats leap like salmon, breaking the surface of the knee-high, emerald grass that is the dairy’s namesake. Once the Wehners improved their soil, the grass became nutrient-rich and the goats’ and cows’ milk tasted better. Making cheese was a logical next step.

Kyle was Desiree’s co-conspirator when she started making cheese after ordering a book, Cheesemaking Made Easy, off the Internet. He was then a small boy, and their efforts were limited to what could fit in the refrigerator.

“We fed a lot of cheese to the dogs,” she says. She started with one goat, which became six, and then 13, all bleating to be milked every day at 4 a.m. She took over the dining room table as her drawing board, and soon refrigerators lined their farmhouse’s front porch. Slowly, she fell into the rhythmic, time-sensitive demands of the craft. “Making cheese is like having a baby,” she says. “You have to mess with it all the time.”

Handmade, artisan cheeses are especially persnickety: They must be turned on schedule, allowed to breathe, and protected in temperature- and humidity-controlled environments. Desiree learned to cultivate mold and cultures to produce different flavors and “bloom,” the dusty outer fingerprint on a cheese’s rind. Sweet Grass’ prizewinning gouda and tomme are prime examples of its rich, pure, buttery-flavored product.

Desiree says she didn’t start making cheeses to create a new business, much less one that her children might one day take on. “I didn’t do it for them,” she says. “I did it for myself.”

The Wehners are respectful of whatever occupation their now-adultoffspring choose to take. “I’d like them to do it because they have a passion for it, not because it’s what they know how to do,” says Al. “... My biggest thing is for them to say they’re enjoying their life, and not working day to day for a paycheck. Chasing that—you’ll never have enough.”

Even farmers who aren’t interested in any other kind of agriculture might envy the Wehners for bringing their children back to their small Georgia farm. For their daughter Jessica Little—who had added a business -degree and a husband who wanted to be a chef—returning to Thomasville was the last thing on her mind.

“Never say never,” she laughs now. She and Jeremy both worked in upscale restaurants in -Atlanta and Tallahassee, and came back to help her parents.

“It was Jeremy who convinced me,” she says. They helped market the cheeses to restaurants and chefs; Desiree and Al began to teach them the business.

Once they started a family, the -Littles swallowed hard and decided to buy Sweet Grass from Desiree and Al.

“We said, ‘OK, yes, we’ll be in debt, but when would you get the opportunity to do this?’ ” says Jessica. Now she bubbles with excitement at the “huge market” she sees developing in organic and natural foods: “We have people calling us from all over every day, asking us, ‘Is there anywhere else we can find beef or eggs without growth hormones?’. . . The South is traditionally a little behind, and we’re on the forefront of knowledge that is just spreading.”

Son Clay may return to run the new dairy so that the Wehners can concentrate on their new mission: Helping train the many young people they encounter who, as Desiree says, “want to work for us, to become grass dairy farmers and share milk and pay for some cows to go out on their own. It’s more about helping people meet their dreams. Hopefully, people are realizing money isn’t the end-all to happiness.”

But with all she’s accomplished at Sweet Grass, isn’t she going to miss making cheese?

Desiree pauses. “Gee,” she says. “I wish you hadn’t asked that.”