In only five years, Chapel’s Country Creamery in Easton has rocketed from family-owned and -run dairy farm to selling its artisanal cheeses to the likes of Whole Foods and internationally known chef and restauranteur, Wolfgang Puck. The products – Chapel’s Country Creamery Garlic and Chive Cheddar, Talbot Reserve Cheddar, Chapel Colby, and Bay Blue — are all handmade from the Grade A, high butterfat milk produced by Eric Foster’s herd of grass-fed Holstein and Jersey cows. Dairying alone is labor intensive — cows need to be milked like clockwork twice a day, once in early morning, even if it’s the morning after an all-night New Year’s Eve party, and again in the evening. Christmas, graduations, weddings, funerals. Cows don’t care. Add to that an artisanal cheese-making business and you’re talking 24/7. But for Holly and Eric Foster, it’s been a labor of love all the way.
“My husband has always loved cows,” say Holly, the stay-at-home working mom of four kids ages 6 through 17. “I don’t come from a farming background, but I love the lifestyle.”
Eric Foster grew up on a dairy farm in Talbot County, went to college at University of Maryland and got his degree in animal science with an eye to becoming a veterinarian. Yet even then, he milked the university’s dairy cows – the butterfat-rich ice cream made from UMD’s cows is renowned – and yearned for the farming life.
“My husband wanted to be a dairy farmer,” Holly says. “[But] he knew it was a struggle to be sustainable, especially since we didn’t inherit our farm.”
They married in college and started small, buying a few heifers to raise for ‘fun’ and for the extra money.
“It’s an investment, like a savings account,” Holly explains. “You raise them up a couple of years and if you put them with a bull, you sell them as springers and they start producing milk.”
Gradually, they grew their bovine savings account to 30 cows, and fourteen years ago, bought their farm. But the farm had no milking parlor and no barn.
“We put everything up from scratch,” says Holly. “We were actually insane to do that really. A friend Eric went to college with, who’s an organic grower in Florida, said no way you can do that – talk about the cost of equipment! And the [milk] market rides up and down a lot.”
They did it anyway. But the economics of farming a single product, coupled with the vagaries of the marketplace –“ ‘09 was a terrible year; a lot of longtime dairymen went out of business,” Holly says — pushed the pair to diversify. They knew that to thrive as farmers, they had to create ‘value added products’ from their own milk. Holly had gone to Cal Tech to learn how to make cheese and loved it. She began taking more classes and doing more research. Then for Christmas, Eric gave Holly a Jersey cow. Rainey, whose picture now graces the website.
And, in the end, they decided to go for it, but before they would invest in all that equipment, they would see if the business would fly. Holly would do the marketing, build the website, first. And she found a cheese maker in Pennsylvania to make the first batches of cheese. But the was a big glitch on the very first haul of milk; the cheese maker had thrown his back out, so he couldn’t make the cheese. Holly tried to contact the hauler, but the milk was already on its way. Then, at the last minute, so was Holly.
“I called them and said I could come make the cheese with his equipment if he would agree to assist me,” she says. “It was a gamble. It’s a personal thing. But he thought it was great. And that’s how that relationship got started. I’d go up and make cheese all day and my mom would watch the babies. When I came back, she’d say to me, “Well, that was your day off!””
Holly quickly established a routine – going up with fishing coolers of milk and bringing back cheese. They’ve maintained that relationship as their business has grown through farmers’ markets, marketing to local shops and chefs. Among their many customers is Easton’s Bartlett Pear Inn, voted best in Maryland. But while they now make much of their cheese right on the farm, some of their milk still goes up to Pennsylvania to the original cheese maker up there.
“Our business has grown so much that we’ve outgrown our building, but he does our cheddars because they take so much longer to age,” Holly says. “Talbot Reserve is a one-year cheddar. That’s a lot of cheese that has to age and we don’t have the space for it all. “
They now have the helping hands of not only their children, but high school interns who work there in the morning for an advance ag class.
“That was great,” she says. “They are learning hand’s on not just of farming but what you can do with farming, that there’s other markets to get into.”
Chapel’s Country Creamery
10380 Chapel Rd.
Easton, MD
410-820-6647
https://www.chapelscountrycreamery.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXCnriCtb98
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgVGsA9FT_E&feature=related
For a list of venues through which you can buy the cheese
https://www.chapelscountrycreamery.com/find.html
https://www.chapelscountrycreamery.com/
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