Shelburne Farms gets back to making cheese

SHELBURNE, Vt. (WCAX) - Shelburne Farms is back to making cheese after taking two months off to focus on packing gifts for the holiday season and they’re churning out the pounds.

On day one, the crew estimates they made about 575 pounds of cheddar -- and that’s on top of an already busy year. They had an 11% yield, turning nearly 1.5 million pounds of fresh milk into 162,000 pounds of cheddar.

“It’s actually scaled slightly back from other years though. We, like a lot of places, had a slight staffing shortage, so we had sort of scale back how many days a week we could make, but because our cows were producing so much milk, we were to keep up with those days that we couldn’t make cheddar with all the excess we were making on the days we could,” said Helen Cowan with Shelburne Farms.

They say during the pandemic, wholesalers have been asking for smaller, cutdown pieces of cheese. For Shelburne, they say this has been a challenge.

Click the video above to see our full interview with Cowan.

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