I'm playing catch-up on a couple things after my horrible laptop crisis. One, of real importance to Minnesotan locavores, is the debut of Rochdale Farms cheese and butter. Jill Lewis at Heavy Table has the full breakdown on these new items, which have debuted at local, Twin Cities grocery co-ops, and which use milk from local Amish, sustainable, and organic dairy farms. Read up -- it's a good piece.

I'm excited about these cheeses because we talk a lot about the need for sustainable food to become more affordable, and products like Rochdale Farms' are a step in the right direction. They're not cheap-cheap, but for a new line of organic and rBGH-free cheeses to price out at a couple bucks per slice (the Colby-Jack is a particularly good deal), that's great for regular families who want to serve healthy, hardy cheeses and not break the bank.

But any time you see a low price on food -- organic or not -- you should always ask, "Is that price good for the farmer?  Is the dairy family at the other end of the food chain just as happy as I am about that cheese price?"

I decided to go right to the horse's mouth and called one of the farming co-ops producing grass-fed organic milk for Rochdale Farms' cheese.

"I can't tell you how huge it is that we have this opportunity to sell our milk," Steve Young-Burns told me. Steve is the sales director for PastureLand Co-op, a cooperative of four small, grass-fed dairy farms.

Like the rest of the crippled U.S. dairy industry, PastureLand has been hurting. Organic dairy farmers do receive a premium price for their milk, of course, but labor and feed costs are more intensive for these farms, and, now, the going price for organic milk is often lower than the "sustainable" price *, just as it is for conventional milk. It's generally accepted that a sustainable price, one that at least covers cost of goods, is $16-17 per hundredweight for conventional milk, but, according to Farm and Dairy, the average price has been well under $12 per hundredweight for big chunks of 2009.

Numbers like that aren't availabe for the whole orgnic milk industry, but Young-Burns says the story is the same on the organic side of the fence.

"PastureLand farmers have been routinely selling [organic] milk at 17-20% below the cost of production, just to get something," Young-Burns said. "2009 was just a brutal year for us."

Fortunately, the deal with Rochdale Farms cheese was a breath of fresh air for PastureLand on two fronts: 1) The farmers received an above cost-of-goods price for their milk, and (2) PastureLand was delighted to have their grass-fed milk featured in a blue cheese made by the famous Faribault Dairy, the frequently decorated cheesemakers who created Rochedale Farms cave-aged blue cheese (which, I have to tell you,while it's not "cheap" it is an exquisite cheese. Jill at Heavy Table didn't gush quite enough about this blue.)

In an era where it's very possible to meet your farmers online, in grocery stores, or at farmers markets, it's more important to know that you'll be able to say you loved eating their food without having shortchanged them.

"We were very happy to work with Jeff [Jirik] at Faribault Dairy," Young-Burns said. "He's ethical and paid our farmers a good price, and Rochdale Farms is a good outlet. I'd love to sell PastureLand milk to them again."

(*NOTE: I'd welcome any discussion about sustainable prices for organic and/or conventional milk from dairy farmers who happen to be reading. My guess is that there's little agreement on the prices I'm quoting here.)

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* Faribault Dairy on the Food Network