Lillooet Sheep and Cheesery
Photos by Michael Piazza
FAMILY-SIZE OPERATION FOCUSES ON THE “PARTS THAT MAKE SENSE RIGHT NOW”
Lillooet Sheep & Cheesery officially started when Gillian Marino and Nathaniel Higley bought a 100-acre farm in Boxford, Massachusetts. It was 2015 and they had plans to regenerate the land, which is conserved by the Essex County Greenbelt Association and Boxford Open Land Trust. They would bring in sheep and build a custom cheesery for Gillian, a bona fide cheesemaker, to make farmstead sheep milk cheese (defined as cheese made on the farm where the animals are raised)—the only farm to do so in Massachusetts.
On the property was a farmhouse with parts that date to 1688 and a one-and-a-half-story barn. But that barn was not up to the standards needed for cheesemaking. So they reached out to architect Benjamin Nutter before the purchase to make sure new construction on conservation land was even possible; Nutter had worked on the property’s farm buildings over the years with past owners. Turns out, if they moved the one-and-a-half-story barn from conservation land to a two-acre unrestricted portion (though those two acres are within the Boxford Historic District so the Boxford Historic District Commission had to approve of that), a new building would be allowed in its place.
After almost two years of designing and building, Gillian and Nathaniel’s first full year with sheep in their new sheep barn and cheesery was 2017—the same year they welcomed their daughter. They sold meat and wool for one year and added cheesemaking in 2019. This year, however, with a second baby due in September, they made the hard decision to temporarily scale back to just selling meat and wool again.
For Gillian and Nathaniel, their passion lies in keeping their operations small and having their hands in everything. So, although they do employ Jacob Quiring, a fulltime flock manager, and Erin Bligh, a cheesemaker who works part-time, hiring someone to do the jobs Gillian and Nathaniel love while they are busy taking care of their children is never how they’ve envisioned running their business.
“We decided to do the parts of the farm that make sense right now,” says Gillian. “The thing we really want to do—cheesemaking—unfortunately is the first thing to go because it’s the easiest thing to come off the top. We talked about other alternatives, like bringing in milk and hiring another cheesemaker, but we really want to be making cheese with our own milk. Having more plates spinning in the air right now just didn’t make sense.”
Plus, in the midst of Covid-19 and the stressors its impact is having on the food industry, they now know how hard it would have been to maintain the cheese sales they had last year. “The fact that we can go into a holding pattern and not just shut down is a really good thing,” says Gillian. So far, the business they’ve lost from restaurant meat orders has been picked up from direct-to-consumer sales, including some farmers markets, special orders and walk-ins to their self-service farmstand on the property.
“We’re so small that selling direct-to-consumer is doable,” says Nathaniel. “We’ve seen a big push from the community. I think a lot of people who really want to be shopping locally have a bit more time and energy to make it happen. Plus, the idea of buying from the producer seems safer these days.”
But how did they get here ... with 100 sheep grazing on picturesque historical farmland, balancing the needs of their growing family with the hard work required to sell meat, wool and cheese to their community?
After graduating from Brown University with a neuroscience degree, Gillian was drawn to food and wanted to live and work on a farm in order to understand the entire cycle of cheesemaking—how things go “from grass to milk to animal to cheese,” she says. A cheesemaker friend at one of the farmers markets she frequented set her up with a family-run sheep dairy in Italy where she lived for months at a time over the years, learning all about farming, butchering and making cheese on a small scale. “That experience still sort of sits in my head as the ideal,” she says. When she came home, she worked as a butcher and held a few cheesemonger positions before meeting Nathaniel at a dinner party.
Nathaniel studied economic and environmental studies at Hobart College and then worked with the City of Boston to promote sustainable transport, which involved teaching kids at public schools how to ride and fix bikes. When he met Gillian, he envisioned how running a farm could fit a lot of his ideals for community building. “So there was a shift,” he says, “but following your love’s passion is not a hard thing to do, especially when it fits so many of mine well.”
As they began formulating the idea for Lillooet, they tested out the reality of working together on a farm—first at Cricket Creek Farm in Williamstown (“I was in the cheese room and he was out working with cows,” says Gillian), then Meadowood Farms in upstate New York. Then, they felt it was time to embark on their own dream and found the Boxford property.
As they got started, they knew it would be important to work with local people who were excited about what they were doing. “From the get-go, that was Ben,” says Gillian about Benjamin Nutter. Nutter lives for this type of project. He runs his architecture firm, Benjamin Nutter Architects, at his family’s Nutter Farm in Topsfield, Massachusetts, which has 20 acres of land conserved by Essex County Greenbelt and more than 330 years of agricultural history. In addition to his house and office, there are three other family homes on the perimeter of the conservation land. Also, two and a half acres are leased to Iron Ox Farm, a small-scale vegetable farm. Nutter Farm and Lillooet are similar in the sense that Greenbelt does not own the conserved land—it only holds the restrictions on how the land may be used. But this level of preservation is so important to Nutter and his work.
“We work on a lot of old buildings all the time,” says Nutter,“and we’ve grown fond of thinking that what we do as an architectural practice is preservation, which both in respect to farmland and architecture, is sustainable.” To him, this is the basis of “farmitecture”—how the sustainable aspects of architecture are connected to those of agriculture.
Nutter and his team, which includes Rick Bernard, the senior architect in charge of Lillooet’s new sheep barn and cheesery, toured other cheesemaking operations and became very familiar with the whole process. The result is an impressive structure with a 4,000-square-foot footprint (the most the Essex County Greenbelt Association would allow) that not only functions as it should but also fits in with the land; the barn side is sheathed in natural shingles and the cheesery side covered in white clapboard.
“We hadn’t designed a cheesery before but that didn’t deter them,” says Bernard about Gillian and Nathaniel. “When Gillian worked in cheeseries, it was always an old building that was renovated so she was excited to design a space for the actual function of making cheese. We let her drive the design of what would work best for her.”
On the first floor is the barn area for the sheep; a milking parlor; a large central room with areas for wash, prep and packaging; and small closed-off rooms serving as brine, haloir (aging room) and cave spaces. On the second floor are a few multipurpose areas that can be used as offices, storage or even for classes or functions in the future. With this building in place, Lillooet’s cheesemaking can start right up again whenever the time is right.
In the meantime, Gillian and Nathaniel are happy that sheep farming is a business that can pivot. “Having those three product lines—meat, wool and cheese—gives us a little more flexibility,” says Gillian, “which is great but you have to be really smart about your numbers because doing it at this scale is a tightrope walk.” But, she says, it also means that customers cross over. “People buying wool venture into buying meat and cheese and the cheese customers sometimes buy a knit kit to make a hat. Our farmstand is well rounded.”
They are thankful that sheep dairies are pretty rare, making their business special from the start. The quality of the milk is also top-notch. “I’m spoiled because I started working with sheep’s milk first,” says Gillian. “The protein and fat in their milk is practically engineered for cheesemaking. That’s not to say other milk cheeses aren’t delicious, because they are, but as the person making the cheese, sheep’s milk just wants to be cheese. This milk separates willingly into curd and whey, whereas other milk can be more finicky.”
Because of the greater content of fat and protein, sheep milk cheese tends to taste a lot richer. “Creamier isn’t the right word,” she says, “because that depends on the style of the cheese, but the milk itself is closer to cream than it is to milk.”
But the work involved is not easy, especially since they run the farm with sustainable practices. “We don’t till the fields and we’re not using any commercial fertilizers or pesticides,” says Nathaniel. “The only things we're doing to the field are adding lime, spreading seed and rotating.” The sheep, which number close to 100 in May and “come down to 30 to 35 as we sell meat or people pick up lambs they want to keep as pets,” says Gillian, graze on about 20 acres, visiting a section of the pasture and then waiting about a month before returning to that section again. When they made cheese last year, Gillian would milk the sheep for two hours twice a day and put in eight- to 12-hour days three to four times a week making the cheese. Cutting and wrapping could add up to an additional full day per week, plus there was preparing for weekly farmers markets, which were all-day affairs.
Despite all the hard work, Gillian and Nathaniel love it. They look forward to when they can open up their cheesery doors and complete the cycle, as Gillian says, “from grass to milk to animal to cheese” again. Life at Lillooet is hopeful, conscientious, patient and full of hard work.
“Having a life in which I work from home and the work is tiring and it’s a constant learning experience and it involves trying new things—that’s really good for my soul,” says Gillian. “Keeping it small is always important to us. It really is and always will be a family farm.”
This story appeared in the Summer 2020 issue.