Hidden Springs Creamery

Brenda and Dean Jensen started the farm when Dean bought his wife 50 sheep for Christmas. Over time the flock grew, and Brenda discovered she had both a deep love and talent for making top notch cheeses. Brenda grew the flock and the business to about 350 milking sheep and has a long list of awards her cheeses have won. She became the person everyone associated with great Sheep Milk Cheese. Thankfully, as Brenda and Dean started exploring what their next great adventure would be, Amy and Travis found them and have agreed to take the reins. Brenda and Dean are not moving far, just up the road to allow for visits to the ladies and anytime Brenda gets an urge to make some cheese, she is not far.

Growing up on a Vermont maple sugar farm, Amy Forgues often dreamed of making farmstead cheese with her own milk, but the building cost for a new creamery starts in the six figures, an amount she and her husband Travis considered "insurmountable." Instead, they turned to organizing. When the milk buyer for her in-laws' farm was swallowed up by a large dairy processor in 1999, Forgues and her husband rallied 60 small farmers to join the Organic Valley dairy cooperative instead. "At the time, these large processors were ditching the farmers and just taking the market share. That's what we wanted to avoid," she says. "We were 23 and 24 years old, and we felt like we did something to change agriculture in the state."

Forgues and her husband began working for Organic Valley directly, and that job is the reason they moved out to Wisconsin in 2013. But the couple missed the rhythms of farm life, and when Forgues learned that sheep's milk cheese champion Brenda Jensen was looking to sell Hidden Springs Creamery, she took a leap of faith. "We hadn't farmed for nine years at that point, and it took eight months of visiting the farm to realize this was something we could do," she explains. Travis is a minority co-owner and still works at Organic Valley; Amy took over Hidden Springs in April.