After giving us a taste of the raw milk, White stirred in two quarts of whey, the watery stuff that had been separated from the curds during yesterday's cheese-making, raised the heat in the vat, and salted the rinds of four cheeses he'd formed the previous day. He turned a crank to tighten a valve ("that's an $1,800 valve") and stirred in rennet to start the curdling process. "Time to feed the pigs," White said, closing the vat and noting the time and temperature in a logbook. Everyone perked up considerably.

We followed a tractor toting three metal cans of today's whey to a small pasture. Dumping the thin yellow liquid into troughs, White said, "I'm growing prosciutto," and smiled at the jousting of the pink and black piglets.

It was a bucolic scene -- the lowing cows, the slurping pigs, a handful of chickens on the loose. But it had some latent tension. Producing food this way is expensive. At the farmers market, Bobolink's cheeses cost $20 a pound. After watching for more than an hour while White cut curds ("curd knife: $800"), strained them, and poured the slippery cubes into cylindrical molds, I could understand the labor intensity of artisanal cheese making. "But I don't want to feed only the hedge-fund manager," he said. "I want to bring the price down."

Even so, White contends that the cost is an illusion. "In the long run our cheese is cheaper," he said. A full accounting of externalities, White maintained, will eventually make his cheeses more economical for both consumers and the planet, relative to cheeses made from the milk of corn-fed cows: "The price of those cheeses will come up and ours will stay the same." Why? Because only 1.2 cents of each Bobolink dollar is spent on fuel, while 35 cents of the industrial-cheese dollar goes to fuel. Most dairy cows eat corn grown using petroleum-based fertilizers and harvested by diesel-burning machines. The Whites don't buy corn, and they fertilize their hay fields with manure. Most cheese-makers don't produce their own milk: They buy it and haul it from afar, burning even more fossil fuel. They refrigerate their cheese at 35 degrees, while the Whites keep theirs in an underground cave at its natural 55-degree temperature. When White brings his cheese to market, a round trip of 100 miles, he chills it with 12 reusable ice packs.

"After Hurricane Katrina," White said, "I overheard a greenmarket customer asking a farmer if the rising price of fuel would keep him from bringing his produce to market. 'If the price of fuel goes up,' said the farmer, 'I won't have any produce to sell.' "

At lunchtime, we sat under a maple, sampled cheeses, and devoured local strawberries and hot focaccia -- the dough, cheese, and prosciutto had been produced within a hundred feet of where we sat. Then White mentioned, almost in passing, that he was on the hunt for new land: His landlord had decided to sell the farm to a developer. This property would soon sprout McMansions.

But because today's group had put $550 in the Whites' pocket, as did groups nearly every summer weekend, and because we bought cheese in his farm store, White was feeling okay about finding new land. Educational programs like today's, plus a menu of other programs the Whites offer year-round, contribute significantly to the farm's income. "Add in the extended word-of-mouth sales growth, and our education programs are extremely profitable for the whole farm enterprise," he said. "And of course, environmental education is the ultimate political act. If you want to make paradigm-shifting foods, you have to be willing to be an educator."

Certainly the best way to support a local farm is to buy its products. But, White said, "if you bring your children to the farm and enlighten them, the support goes on." He paused, but only for a second. "You vote three times a day. You can vote at the drive-through window or you can vote at the farmers market."

After lunch, a few of us walked through the fields, waded the creek, and went looking for the farm's latest attraction, a two-day-old baby cow. But the mother wasn't in the mood to show off her calf, hidden in the cedars by the stream. That was okay with Lucy, who switched her attention to more gregarious baby cows. She hadn't milked a cow, but stroking the heads of appreciative calves, standing knee-deep in clover, may have been even better.