Angela Miller had to furlough the goats when the pandemic came.
She lost all her employees at Consider Bardwell Farm in Pawlet, Vt., during the lockdown. Her remaining herd manager had to go home to take care of her children.
Miller could not manage the 200 goats all by herself. One of the former cheesemakers at Consider Bardwell had her own farm nearby, so Miller sent most of the goats to her.
Miller reopened her farm in July 2020, not knowing what the market for her cheeses would be. She set up her website so people could order cheese online.
The farm had already survived a major crisis before the pandemic. In September 2019, it had to shut down after finding listeria monocytogenes — bacteria that the Centers for Disease Control warns can cause serious illness — on its raw-milk cheese.
Slowly, Miller said, the farm is coming back. She is distributing mainly in the Northeast now, instead of the whole country, as she did before the listeria scare and the pandemic. National distributors, she said, demand significant discounts that she cannot afford to offer.
“We were starting to run on a superhighway that maybe was not made for us,” she said. Now, she said, she is selling a lot online directly to consumers.
Last month, Consider Bardwell Farm and seven other Vermont producers received a publicity boost when they were listed by Food & Wine magazine as among the 50 best cheesemakers in the United States.
In one way, the pandemic has brought the farm back to its origins.
When the farm opened in the 1860s, Miller said, it took milk from about 30 farms nearby. A railroad would pick up the cheese, cooperatively owned by the farmers in the valley, every couple of weeks to take to Boston, Albany and New York City.
The co-op went out of business during the Great Depression, and the railroad tracks have been converted to a recreational trail.
Today, the farm produces three cheeses made only from cow’s milk, purchased from another farm in Pawlet that was one of the original farms to supply milk in the 1860s.
The three cheeses are named after Vermont towns. The Rupert is an Alpine-style cheese that comes in 20- to 25-pound wheels aged for at least nine months. Miller said it is like a Gruyere or a Comte. The Pawlet is a 10-pound wheel of Italian-style cheese like a Fontina.
“That’s our most popular, kind of sweet and mild and family-friendly,” Miller said. “Kids love it.”
The Dorset is a washed-rind gooey stinky cheese that comes in a 12-ounce square.
Miller bought her farm in 2000. For her, it was a return to the farm after college and a time in the publishing business in New York. She had grown up on a farm in Pennsylvania. Cheese was a passion all her life, she said. She had wanted to start a cheese shop in New York, but did not have any capital.
“So it was just a dream long in the coming of getting back to farming,” she said.
Before the pandemic, restaurants played an important role in promoting her cheeses.
Slowly, as they try to find ways to survive the pandemic, Miller said, her restaurant customers are returning.
“Maybe if a high-end restaurant in New York City might have been buying 10 wheels a week of one of our most popular cheeses, they’re now buying two or three, but it’s something,” Miller said.
“I mean, everybody’s struggling to keep the restaurants open.”