HARDWICK — The baby goats craned their necks over green pen fencing as Annie Rowden walked by.
“This is future milk right here,” the 31-year-old said while the young goats — called kids — clambered to meet their visitor inside a barn at Bridgman Hill Farm.
The several dozen kids aren’t only future milk producers. They may be Jasper Hill Farm’s future, too.
Rowden, her husband Ryan Andrus and the Greensboro cheesemaker have teamed up to expand into a new market: goat’s milk cheese. That’s a first for Jasper Hill, the Northeast Kingdom company whose cow’s milk products have won global and national awards.
Since this summer, Jasper Hill has launched two hybrid cheeses: Eligo and Bridgman Blue. Both are made of half cow’s milk and half goat’s milk. Now, the company is introducing a third cheese, Highlander.
All three products use milk from Bridgman Hill, a former cow dairy bought last year and co-owned by the couple and the company. The farm spans 240 acres north of downtown Hardwick. About 250 goats live there, and around 100 more will soon arrive.
The partnership is an opportunity to tap into growing interest in both non-cow-milk and artisan cheeses, said Zoe Brickley, Jasper Hill’s marketing development director.
And it’s a chance for the cheesemaking stalwart to reinvent itself.
“There’s all kinds of cool, traditional cheese styles that we can be inspired by now,” Brickley said.
The collaboration came after years of cross-country planning.
Rowden and Andrus had been running a goat dairy in California for Cypress Grove, another prestige cheese company that specializes in goat’s milk.
But after a Swiss corporation bought the company, the two grew disenchanted with top-down, increasingly industrial creameries.
“They’ve sold out to corporate America or international companies,” Rowden said. “And that trickles down, as much as you’re told it’s going to stay the same.”
The couple had been looking for a new opportunity when Andrus, 38, attended an American Cheese Society conference in 2017. He listened to a presentation by Mateo Kehler, who owns Jasper Hill with his brother, Andy.
Jasper Hill’s values drew the couple in. “Their attention to quality, their connection to the land, their intention to everything they do,” Rowden said.
So they reached out to the Vermont company with a pitch: ever consider making goat cheese?
Brickley, the Jasper Hill marketing director, said customers had always asked about goat products. But Jasper Hill wanted to make sure it had experts on board before stepping into the field.
The company found that expertise with Andrus and Rowden. Brickley said the couple stood out because they had experience running a scaled, technologically advanced goat farm and wanted an ownership stake.
Over the last year, the partners bought the Hardwick farmland and about 350 goats from a Windsor dairy. Rowden and Andrus hired two employees and started carting the goats to their new home in June.
Brickley said Jasper Hill’s new products combine the best parts of cow’s milk and goat’s milk.
“You get the interesting, goaty aroma, but the richness of the cow’s milk helps balance the recipe and gives a fullness of texture and a richness of flavor,” Brickley said.
The hybrid cheeses are more expensive than the company’s other products, she said, which is another new step for the business.
In the future, Jasper Hill may offer yogurts and cheeses made entirely of goat’s milk, Brickey said. The company plans to build a market for the goat products over the next year.
At Bridgman Hill Farm, Rowden and her husband are focused on the immediate future — moving the rest of their herd to Hardwick, getting the animals used to their new feeding and milking routines and finishing the construction of another barn.
The goats are adjusting, and so are they. But they’ve found something in Vermont missing from California.
“Everyone talks dairy,” Rowden said. “Everybody speaks a language.”
