Make Sheep Great Again!
Donation protected
Friends! Neighbors! Strangers! Help us buy a pasteurizer for our sheep dairy, and support a small organic family farm!
We are Josh, Maria and Ira, and we run Cate Hill Orchard - a sheep dairy, organic apple orchard, and apiary in Greensboro, Vermont.
After many years of dreaming, planning, practicing, training, building, and sweating, we finally got our sheep dairy off the ground, and in the fall of 2016 sold our first batch of state inspected, aged farmstead sheep cheese! Our next step is to buy a pasteurizer, which will allow us to make a variety of exciting, fresh sheep cheeses, such as "mamia" a Basque soft curd cheese, "imeruli" a Georgian fresh hard cheese cultured with kefir, fresh mozarrella, and ricotta. While raw milk cheese must be aged at least 60 days, these cheeses can be sold the day they are made. These unique cheeses will help us stand out in the Vermont cheese marketplace, and give us much needed early season cash flow.
sheep and lambs grazing in the orchard
Budget:
We found a great used vat pasteurizer in North Carolina - at a great price ($6000 less than a new one.)
Used 15 gallon vat pasteurizer: $10,000.
Shipping and handling $1200.
Set-up costs $800.
Total $12,000.
Timeline:
We are milking our 50 ewe flock now and making aged cheeses four times a week. We hope to have a pasteurizer up and running by early June, just in time for the busy summer farmers market season.
5 Reasons to Give:
1) Support an alternative to corporate agriculture
2) Keep Vermont landscape working, open, beautiful
3) Great rewards!
4) Sheep cheese is amazing (more about sheep milk's many health benefits here )
5)Support Maria, Josh, and Ira. We work hard, we love what we do, we love our animals, and we are committed to farming using organic practices. We're asking for your help because we're tired of borrowing money from the bank!
About our farm. We are a diverse family farm with a five acre organic apple orchard, a 30 hive apiary, a 50 head sheep dairy, and small plantings of other fruits and berries.
Call it permaculture, or just the way farms used to be...we believe strongly in the diversity of our farm. Each enterprise is interrelated and mutually beneficial: the honeybees pollinate the apples and other fruits while gathering nectar, the sheep graze in the orchard and get fat on apple drops; the trees in turn are fertilized by composted sheep manure.
The diversity of our farm helps to reduce outside inputs, increasing our resiliency in this time of climate change, and means we never get bored.
catehillorchard.com
THANK EWE!!!
We are Josh, Maria and Ira, and we run Cate Hill Orchard - a sheep dairy, organic apple orchard, and apiary in Greensboro, Vermont.
After many years of dreaming, planning, practicing, training, building, and sweating, we finally got our sheep dairy off the ground, and in the fall of 2016 sold our first batch of state inspected, aged farmstead sheep cheese! Our next step is to buy a pasteurizer, which will allow us to make a variety of exciting, fresh sheep cheeses, such as "mamia" a Basque soft curd cheese, "imeruli" a Georgian fresh hard cheese cultured with kefir, fresh mozarrella, and ricotta. While raw milk cheese must be aged at least 60 days, these cheeses can be sold the day they are made. These unique cheeses will help us stand out in the Vermont cheese marketplace, and give us much needed early season cash flow.
sheep and lambs grazing in the orchard
Budget:
We found a great used vat pasteurizer in North Carolina - at a great price ($6000 less than a new one.)
Used 15 gallon vat pasteurizer: $10,000.
Shipping and handling $1200.
Set-up costs $800.
Total $12,000.
Timeline:
We are milking our 50 ewe flock now and making aged cheeses four times a week. We hope to have a pasteurizer up and running by early June, just in time for the busy summer farmers market season.
5 Reasons to Give:
1) Support an alternative to corporate agriculture
2) Keep Vermont landscape working, open, beautiful
3) Great rewards!
4) Sheep cheese is amazing (more about sheep milk's many health benefits here )
5)Support Maria, Josh, and Ira. We work hard, we love what we do, we love our animals, and we are committed to farming using organic practices. We're asking for your help because we're tired of borrowing money from the bank!
About our farm. We are a diverse family farm with a five acre organic apple orchard, a 30 hive apiary, a 50 head sheep dairy, and small plantings of other fruits and berries.
Call it permaculture, or just the way farms used to be...we believe strongly in the diversity of our farm. Each enterprise is interrelated and mutually beneficial: the honeybees pollinate the apples and other fruits while gathering nectar, the sheep graze in the orchard and get fat on apple drops; the trees in turn are fertilized by composted sheep manure.
The diversity of our farm helps to reduce outside inputs, increasing our resiliency in this time of climate change, and means we never get bored.
catehillorchard.com
THANK EWE!!!
Organiser
Maria Schumann
Organiser
Craftsbury, VT