Sheep Cheese

Randall and Carol Stoker are making sheep cheese in Salmon, Idaho. My wife and I went back to Italy in 2004, and while we were there we enjoyed sheep cheeses in Europe and sheep cheeses in Europe are just phenomenal. We said, Why can't we find more sheep cheeses in the United States? So we started touring sheep dairies in the United States, which wasn't very many, but there was a few on the East Coast, and every time we visited a dairy we thought, you know, this might be something we could do. It's kind of a niche product. The sheep cheeses are more nutritious, they're allergy friendly, they're digestive friendly, and you don't have to milk them year round. That was one of the biggest things. You have some pretty intensive stuff in the spring and in the summer, but you get the fall in the winter off every year. And we like that idea. We have 20 acres divided into eight different pasture paddocks and we rotate the sheep through the grazing. We graze from about the middle of May until usually about the end of October. After that, we feed alfalfa hay. This barn, we lamb in this barn, we milk in the parlor. We make cheese in this end of the top portion. And we live in this sheet portion of the barn. This barn is very well utilized. We saw a video of a sheep dairy in Australia that had a similar rapid exit system to this. So this has been patterned after what we saw on a YouTube video from Australia. A sheep dairy. Speaker3: Process of cheese making is your milk. Then once you heat it to a certain temperature, you start it by putting in cultures and the cultures is what starts giving it its flavors. Speaker1: What a wonderful way to make a living.