Jeanna Duerscherl | The Roanoke Times

Helen Feete and her husband Rick own Meadow Creek Dairy in Galax.

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Name: Rick and Helen Feete
Business: Meadow Creek Dairy
Product: Farmstead raw milk cheese, milk
Location: 6380 Meadow Creek Road, Galax

At Meadow Creek Dairy, cheese-making really is all in the family.

Rick and Helen Feete get lots of help from daughter Kat, 27, the cellar manager, and son Jim, 25, the farm manager. Kat’s husband and Jim’s girlfriend also work on the farm.

And unlike many small farmers, Meadow Creek Dairy is able to afford one position dedicated entirely to marketing.

The secret to their success is experience — the Feetes have been raising dairy cattle since 1981 and making cheese since 1998.

Until the cheese business took off, they sold raw milk for pasteurization. Now, about 50 percent of their milk is sold wholesale while the rest goes into cheese.

They produce farmstead cheese, which means it is made on the farm from raw milk that came from their cows.

The result: products like their Grayson, a soft, rich, nutty cheese that one San Francisco Chronicle writer called “one of the best new domestic cheeses I’ve tasted in a long time.”

In fact, 98 percent of Meadow Creek’s cheese is sold wholesale, and they sell more in places like California, Minneapolis and New York than they do in Virginia and North Carolina combined.

They recently finished building a new, state-of-the-art cheese house.

“We still can’t meet the market,” Rick Feete said, “even with all of the expansion.”