Sheep’s Milk Cheeses in U.S. Earn Ribbons but Little Profit




Seated with hundreds of colleagues at the American Cheese Society awards ceremony in Des Moines this past July, Rebecca Williams heard her farm’s name announced not once but twice, for its acclaimed sheep’s milk cheeses.

“We make good cheese,” Ms. Williams said to herself as she approached the stage to collect the second-place prize for Peekville Tomme, the farm’s aged wheel. Her ash-ripened Condor’s Ruin had just taken a blue ribbon in another category.

Those two ribbons are probably her last. In October, cheese production ceased at Many Fold Farm, the six-year-old Georgia sheep dairy that Ms. Williams operates with her husband, Ross. “It’s really hard to get such great recognition for your work, have people banging on your door, and it’s not enough to make ends meet,” she said.

Tripped up by the tricky economics of sheep dairying, the Williamses are among several disillusioned dreamers who hoped to succeed with American sheep cheese, a niche that did not exist 30 years ago. Although consumers in the United States have a sizable appetite for European sheep cheeses — Spanish manchego, French Roquefort and Italian pecorino Toscano among them — comparably priced domestic alternatives remain scarce.

“A distributor can import manchego for maybe a third of what it costs us to produce,” said Laurel Kieffer, a Wisconsin sheep farmer and the president of the Dairy Sheep Association of North America.

Still, more American producers are taking the sheep-cheese challenge. From 2010 to 2016, the number of entries in the American Cheese Society competition made exclusively from sheep’s milk jumped 40 percent — enough to merit their own categories in next year’s judging, rather than being lumped with mixed-milk cheeses as in the past. And Europe itself may soon provide a catalyst to growth.

Cheesemakers love sheep’s milk. It has twice as much fat and protein — the main components of cheese — as most cow’s or goat’s milk, and produces nutty aromas and savory flavors in aged wheels. But the sheep don’t make it easy. Many breeds are stingy with milk. A Holstein cow can supply nine gallons a day; a good ewe, on a good day, may part with three quarts.

Most sheep produce milk only six or seven months a year, and breed successfully only in the fall. This leaves many cheesemakers with no milk to sell from October to March, though they still have to pay rent and salaries. Just keeping the flock alive can be an unanticipated challenge; sheep succumb readily to parasites, predators and disease.

“There’s a joke among vets that sheep are born looking for a place to die,” said Ms. Williams, who bought her starter flock in 2010. “Pretty much the first year we were saying, ‘Uh-oh.’”

Until the early 1990s, the United States had almost no dairy sheep, only meat and wool breeds that produced less milk. Sheep-cheese pioneers like David Major of the Vermont Shepherd farm made do, gradually improving their flocks’ milk yield by crossbreeding with European dairy stock from Canada and England.

Then, in the late ’90s, the mad-cow epidemic peaked amid concerns that diseased sheep processed for cattle feed had contributed to it. The United States Department of Agriculture banned imports of live sheep and semen from Canada or Europe.

“We’ve been landlocked here,” said Liam Callahan of Bellwether Farms in Petaluma, Calif., one of the nation’s first sheep dairies. “We’re unable to access the breeds in Europe that are specialized for milk production.” Mr. Callahan would be especially pleased to mate his ewes with Lacaune sheep, a French breed that supplies the milk for Roquefort.

In the coming months, that could happen. About 875 samples, or straws, of frozen Lacaune semen are scheduled to arrive in the United States in February under stringent protocols that the federal Agriculture Department has approved.

“Believe me, it’s a bright spot,” said Mr. Callahan, who has bought some of the straws. If the offspring perform as expected, he said, a dairy farm could have double the milk with nearly the same labor.

More milk could help moderate the cheeses’ high retail prices and make them more competitive with their European counterparts.

“When I see P’tit Basque for $13.99 a pound, it’s like getting kicked in the gut,” said Seana Doughty, the proprietor of Bleating Heart Cheese in Tomales, Calif. “That’s how much it costs me to make Fat Bottom Girl,” her signature sheep cheese, which typically retails for $38 to $40 a pound.

European sheep-cheese producers often have lower land and labor costs; many operate farms that have been in the family for generations. And they benefit from decades of breed research and improvement, some of it government-supported. Budget cuts recently closed North America’s only dairy-sheep research program, at the Spooner Research Station at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Scaling up production would help American sheep dairies, many say. Brenda Jensen, the proprietor of Hidden Springs Creamery in Westby, Wis., started with 50 sheep and now has more than 500. And she isn’t done yet. Ms. Jensen, who has an M.B.A. and a plant-management background, said she could envision milking 2,000.

Sales of Hidden Springs Driftless, a rindless fresh cheese that can be ready in days, have fueled the company’s rapid growth. But Ms. Jensen has also embraced a hormonal technique that helps ewes reproduce year-round.

“The people who have gone to this approach are probably the most successful today,” said Tom Clark, a former investment banker who built Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, in the Hudson River Valley, into a 1,200-head sheep dairy, one of the nation’s largest, before selling it two years ago. “You’ve got a big investment in a milking parlor, people, equipment, pastures. To only use them six months a year is just not efficient.”

Year-round supply would also help these cheeses break into supermarkets; currently, the low volume and high prices limit sales primarily to specialty stores.

Marcia Barinaga understands that, but volume was never her goal. Ms. Barinaga, a former science journalist, wanted to make sheep cheese by hand, like her Basque ancestors, with milk from her own pasture-raised flock. Fifteen years ago, she and her husband bought several hundred acres in Marin County, Calif. Eight years later, Barinaga introduced two aged raw-milk cheeses, Baserri and Txiki, inspired by Basque recipes.

“I was selling them as fast as I could make them,” said Ms. Barinaga, whose wheels were fetching $40 a pound in Bay Area shops. She had to grow to be viable, but couldn’t afford the labor, or the feed, which had more than tripled in price. Her spreadsheets showed profitability at 200 ewes and 20,000 pounds of cheese annually, but she never came close.

“One hundred was my flock at its largest, and that nearly killed me,” she said. In July, Baserri won a blue ribbon from the American Cheese Society. Two months later, Ms. Barinaga announced that she had made her last cheese.

“You just can’t push the price of the product any higher,” she said, “and people are not going to pay what it costs to produce it.”

European cheeses are not the only competition for the domestic ones, said Tess McNamara, the director of retail operations for Lucy’s Whey, which has two cheese shops in New York City. Many shoppers will gravitate to a lower-priced Vermont goat cheese if the local sheep cheese seems too expensive. “People don’t understand the rareness of sheep’s milk,” she said.

Producing yogurt has kept some sheep dairies afloat. Dave Galton, the new proprietor of Old Chatham, expects to continue the brand’s popular sheep yogurts, which generate about half of all of the company’s sales, while building the flock to 2,000 ewes. Mr. Galton said he also intended to produce more mixed-milk wheels, blending cow’s milk with sheep’s milk to lower production costs.

Ms. Doughty of Bleating Heart said she, too, was reluctantly shifting to cow’s milk cheese to save her business. After 2017, sheep cheese from her farm may be history.

“I have this theory that the more expensive the cheese is at retail, the less money the cheesemaker is making,” she said. “Until somebody can start sheep dairies of real size, I just don’t see how it’s ever going to thrive.”

A Sampler of American Sheep Cheeses

For a taste of America’s answer to manchego and pecorino, these acclaimed all-sheep’s-milk cheeses are a fine place to start. (Some can be ordered by phone or online; others may be available at specialty shops or supermarkets like Whole Foods.) JANET FLETCHER

BELLWETHER FARMS SAN ANDREAS Three-month-old raw-milk wheel with a lemony scent and sour-cream tang. (Petaluma, Calif.)

BLEATING HEART CHEESE FAT BOTTOM GIRL Raw-milk wheel with aromas of warm butter, clotted cream, pale caramel and toasted nuts. (Tomales, Calif.)

CARR VALLEY CHEESE CAVE-AGED MARISA Three-month-old wheel with hints of brown butter, toasted hazelnuts and damp cave. (La Valle, Wis., carrvalleycheese.com; 800-462-7258)

GRAFTON VILLAGE CHEESE BEAR HILL Firm raw-milk wheel with a brine-washed rind and sweet, fruity flavors. (Grafton, Vt.)

HIDDEN SPRINGS CREAMERY OCOOCH MOUNTAIN Raw-milk, brine-washed, cave-aged wheel with aromas of toffee and buttered toast. (Westby, Wis.)

LANDMARK CREAMERY ANABASQUE Firm wheel with caramel and warm butter aromas. Modeled after the French cheese Ossau-Iraty. (Albany, Wis., 608-345-1282, landmarkcreamery.com)

MEADOWOOD FARMS LEDYARD Soft-ripened Robiola-style cheese wrapped in grape leaves. (Cazenovia, N.Y.)

SHEPHERD’S WAY FARMS BIG WOODS BLUE Rindless blue, aged five to six months. Tender, moist and creamy, with nutty notes. (Nerstrand, Minn., shepherdswayfarms.com; 507-663-9040)

VERMONT SHEPHERD VERANO Aged raw-milk cheese produced with spring and summer milk only. Mellow and nutty. (Westminster, Vt., 802-387-4473, vermontshepherd.com)

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