They moved from the big city to the green countryside to start FireFly Farms Creamery and had some goats on their farm. Milking the goats was hard work…and that was before the family even got around to making the cheese.

So the cheesemaking family, husbands Michael Koch and Pablo Solanet, called other farm-owning families around them in the Garrett Country, Maryland countryside to find out the cost of goat’s milk. In their quest, Mike and Pablo discovered a mystifying Chamber of Dairy Secrets, with its most confusing riddle, “Baseline Pricing.”

Baselining works like this: In late summer a milk buyer (a cheesemaker, a yogurt maker, etc.) travels to the green countryside to visit a dairy farm and measure how much milk the