Going all in.

• Position: Family business

The Tate family poured everything they had into Goat Lady Dairy. And with a little outside help, it became the region's big cheese.

Ginnie Tate would ride Randolph County's back-roads in her pickup truck, her two floppy-eared Nubian dairy goats sticking their heads out the passenger-side window. She would pull up to anyone checking mail, mowing grass or sitting on a porch and inquire about available acreage. She would break the ice with her only Southern phrase: "Howdy, y'all."

After a couple of weeks, Ginnie's brother Steve Tate says she had developed a following. "The neighborhood was full of gossip about the strange experience they had. And when they were down at the local store, if a newcomer came into the gossip circle and asked who they were talking about, they'd say, 'The goat lady. Haven't you met the goat lady?' Ginnie was 11 years older than me, and she and I grew up on a corn farm in Illinois. But she was a nurse in Chicago, and when she got an offer to move to Greensboro, she wanted to live off the land." And she did, surrounded by family, until her death in 2009.

Ginnie's memory lives on at Climax-based Goat Lady Dairy, which turns goat and cow milk from its and three nearby family farms--Lindale Organic Dairy, Holly Grove Farms and Williams Dairy--into cheeses. They are sold at farmers markets, stores and restaurants up and down the East Coast and a few Western states. It has won awards from the American Cheese Society and was featured in the Washington Post. Ginnie was given a lifetime achievement award from the Conservation Trust of North Carolina a few months before her death, and the farm won a Sustainable Farmers of the Year Award from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association in 2010. But she didn't win those by herself.

Ginnie found the land she was looking for in 1984. The 40-acre farm had a run-down farm house and outbuildings that were at least 200 years old. Steve was working as a marriage and family counselor in Minnesota at the time. "My wife, Lee, and our [two] sons would come visit from Minneapolis in the summer, and each time Ginnie would have a little more on the farm--beautiful vegetable gardens and herbs. So one night we began playing the 'Wouldn't it be fun if ...' game. It was nuts. It was crazy. And in the sober light of morning, we were saying this might be an excellent idea, but we don't have enough land and we need another house. So if the land, across the street is ever for sale, and the white house...