BAYFIELD COUNTY, Wis. – Some people look for buried treasure, thinking there’s hidden treasure in the earth. But others look at the land and see in plain sight the treasure it can provide. They see opportunity on the land where others saw none. Their own hard work and ingenuity creates treasure – and not just for themselves.
The northernmost tip of mainland Wisconsin juts into cold Lake Superior. It’s remote and sparsely populated. Much of the soil is either sand or red clay. There are dense forests; wildlife is abundant, including bears and active wolf packs. But in that wild and remote setting there are still small family farms.
Wisconsin Highway 13 is a paved two-lane road. Bayfield County Road J is paved but a narrow two-lane road. Star Route is a paved but is a patched, bumpy, winding, hilly and narrow town road. Happy Hollow Road is gravel; it passes through the old Frank Belanger Settlement. That settlement began as a farming community comprised of people with Native American and European ancestry. Their kin are still there, along with more recent immigrants. The old settlement area is still dotted with farms.
One of those farms is the home of the Happy Hollow Creamery, a place where treasure is created. In the old Belanger Settlement the land and the lake are infusing delicate rich character into a rare treasure, a gourmet’s delight – a small-batch sheep-milk cheese from Wisconsin’s northern-most artisanal cheesemakers.
On a late-spring day Fred Faye was with his flock of newly shorn sheep and their lambs in his converted cattle barn.
“My folks bought this 160-acre farm in 1972,” he said. “They milked up to 45 head of dairy cows – Holsteins; they quit in 1997. My brother milked cows here from 1998 to 2007. Then he moved to Kansas and bought a farm there. My wife and I moved back here from Georgia in 2008 and bought the farm from my mom in 2017.
“I wanted to be involved in farming but I knew there wasn’t a living to be made here with dairy cattle on this scale. I have a food-science degree and had always been interested in making cheese. I attended the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
“Our flock is up to 65 ewes; we can milk up to 12 sheep at a time. It takes about an hour and a half to milk 60 sheep. Now that lambing is almost done we can sleep at night again.
“When I was 17, I went to France for a few months. There was a little farm about the size of this one; they milked goats and sold the cheese they made. I looked in the barn and there were all these clean goats on straw bedding. Coming from a cow farm it looked like a tidy operation. That made an impression on me.”
Having a large flock of sheep in wolf and bear country might strike some as a risky business. Buy Faye has found an effective way to mitigate the risk of predation for his flock. Chase, mostly Spanish Ranch Mastiff, and an Anatolian Shepherd named Rio patrol the fields and protect the flock. In the years since Faye has grazed his flock on his family farm he has had no predation of livestock from wolves or bears.
“Sheep are relatively low-cost for starting up,” he said. “It wasn’t that expensive for us to buy our flock of sheep. The expensive part is the cheese-plant equipment but ours is tiny. And I like to think that half of my income comes from saving money – fixing my own cars, growing our own food (and) living on our own farm. We are lucky.”
With the milk from their sheep he and his wife, Kelly Faye, and their children create cheese. Happy Hollow Creamery sheep-milk cheese is treasure that’s being discovered by more and more people along the Lake Superior shore. Small-batch family-farm-produced artisanal cheese is a rare find anywhere. But the terroir – the exquisite flavors from the unique character of the land, grass, water and Lake Superior fresh air – make cheese from Happy Hollow Creamery very special.
Happy Hollow Creamery sheep-milk cheese is marketed locally at co-op and grocery stores in Washburn and Ashland, Wisconsin, and in Duluth, Minnesota. It’s marketed more widely through the Bayfield Foods Co-op. The family also sells at local farm markets.
Visit www.facebook.com – search for Happy Hollow Creamery – and www.bayfieldfoods.org for more information.
