Small Business Spotlight: Oregon serves artisan cheese with its wine

What goes best with Oregon's booming wine industry? Cheese, of course. And Oregon has a growing number of artisan cheese makers to help fill that need.

In Sweet Home, Larry and Janice Neilson make cheese on a small goat farm called Fraga Farm, a SAIF policyholder since 2005.

California beginnings
The farm is named for Janice's grandmother, Agnes Fraga, who had a small farm near Alameda, California. When Fraga had to sell her farm because of freeway expansion, the Neilson's rented it for the three years between the sale and the beginning of the freeway construction. During that time, they raised goats, chickens, and rabbits, and grew to love the country life.

"I wanted to be like my grandmother," says Janice.

When the construction began, they had to move. Unable to find another small farm to buy, they returned to the city, where Janice worked as a licensed massage therapist and Larry as an aircraft engine examiner for the federal government. "We lived there for the next 15 years," says Jafraganice. "The houses were so close together that you could hear the neighbors each time they sneezed."

A small farm in Oregon
Believing it was better to spend your life doing what you enjoy, they moved to Oregon to start a small farm similar to the one they had enjoyed so much in California.

For a while after the move, Larry worked for the city of Sweet Home, and Janice continued her work as a licensed massage therapist. They bought two goats and settled slowly into farm life.

Two goats soon became four and eight, and the herd Alpine and Nubian goats kept growing. "We didn't know what to do with all that milk," says Janice. "We made ice cream, yogurt, even goats' milk soap, everything we could imagine."

Becoming cheese makers
In 2000, using books on cheese making and a recipe for farmhouse cheese they got from a neighbor, they began making cheese on their kitchen stove. A business was born.

Fraga Farm became certified organic in 2002. "It takes a lot of hard work and dedication," says Janice, "to treat the goats with holistic methods. I enjoy working closely with them to catch any illness before it gets worse. I learned a lot of natural remedies from my grandmother."

Now the Neilsons have 60 goats and make several types of fresh cheeses -- chevre, farm house cheese, "goatzarella," aged raw cheddar, and an aged raw feta that has earned a blue ribbon from the American Cheese Society.

Janice says that their success has been exciting, but this is where the growth stops.

"Since I retired," says Larry, "I've been working seven days a week. It's been 10 years since we took a vacation."

Even though they could sell much more of their cheese if they wanted, they aren't interested in growing bigger. "I want to keep it small so it's fun," says Janice.