About the Farm

We are a one-of-a-kind creamery, allowing the visitor a unique view of sheep dairy farming as practiced in Europe for the last 4,000 years. We have combined years of cheesemaking expertise and modern equipment from all over the world to build a facility allowing full public access to all farm activities. We educate and involve the visitor in daily life on a real working sheep dairy.

No, we have no shepherds in the family! What we do now surprises us quite often considering we are both engineering graduates from a small New Jersey engineering college (where we met.) We have always had a love of farming and a deep respect for all things God put on our own green earth, so we started by purchasing small acreage in Hunterdon County (NJ) and raising beef cattle. After building a house on the same land, we moved and started with a flock of Rambuillet sheep. We quickly found out that sheep meat farming on a small scale (less then 500 head) is a hobby and will not meet our goal of a sustainable family farm.

We had been traveling in Europe for years and always noted the wonderful selection of cheeses in the open air markets of Provence, Tuscany and northern Spain. So in parallel with learning sheep herding on our own farm, we started learning cheese making European style until we felt confident enough to try our own.

The trips became less vacation and more sheep and cheese ventures until we settled on the Dutch Friesian milk sheep and decided to start production of a Pyrenees style cave aged cheese. The travels to Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Belgium continued, contacts made and the craft honed and polished. It took years until we were satisfied with what we made and released it to the public under the name of "Oldwick Shepherd" after our lovely local village.

However, keeping 50-60 sheep and making wonderful cheese is not a sustainable family farm. Our goal was to create a self sustaining sheep dairy that would be geared to educate everyone in the process of sheep management and cheese making. At the same time, we wanted to make delicious cheeses that follows the old style European methods and thus the Valley Shepherd Creamery was born.

Many trips to Europe's hidden sheep creameries (so many seem to be lodged in impossible mountain passes) were made with cameras, translators, measuring tapes and many broken conversations took place in Basque, French, Spanish and Italian.

Valley Shepherd Creamery is the culmination of our experiences, dreams and hopes and would not have been possible without the help of shepherds from many remote mountain tops. (you can read about it below because we want to focus on 'our story' here.) Our goals can be summarized with this quote:

"What people do not understand, they do not value, what they do not value, they will not protect, and what they do not protect, they will lose. "- C. Jordan

We built Valley Shepherd Creamery as a family destination for everyone to enjoy. It is a learning experience you will not forget soon.