Brian:  While much of the milk from Morrisland Dairy is actually sold as milk on grocery store shelves, some of it will go into cheese.  And speaking of cheese, in our next story, Alisa Hines travels to Hardesty, Oklahoma, where a variety of different cheeses, from prairie fire to panhandle cheddar, are made by hand.
Alisa:  Russell Gift spends much of his day cutting and packaging cheese, something he discovered by chance.
Russell Gift:  There’s got to be something I can do with this milk, so I ordered a little home cheese making kit off the Internet, and started making cheese.
Alisa:  Russell has been in the dairy business all of his life, but when prices started skyrocketing for cattle feed, he was forced to sell his cattle and concentrate on cheese. 
Gift:  Right now, it’s not really feasible to have our own herd.  If feed costs come down to where I can afford the labor, and the feed to produce the milk myself, I will definitely produce my own milk again.  
Alisa:  Russell bought out a friend’s cheese plant, and says he produces about 1000 pounds of cheese a week.  Wanting to keep the cheese all natural, he’s selective about what goes in.
Gift:  To me, what we need to be eating or what our food source should be is the way it was a hundred years ago, before it was commercialized.
Alisa:  And while Russell does not produce his own milk, he is very careful about the milk he uses, requiring all the people he buys from to sign contracts limiting what their cows eat.
Gift:  If you’re going to have a high quality end product, you’re going to have to have a high quality input.  If you have garbage in, you’re going to have garbage out.
Alisa:  Now Russell says his hands-on approach to making his all-natural cheese gives his cheese a little more personality.
Gift:  We’re an artisan cheese plant.  We’re handmade.  We do everything by hand.
Alisa:  A hand that takes the cow to chow.