This is the second in a six-part series of stories produced through a partnership with the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition.

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The scene was like a psalm. A flock of sheep graze in the tall grass - fescue, orchard grass, clover's coming soon - at the base of green mountains, as fat clouds - they, too, white and fluffy - ease across a big blue sky. It even smells like a nursery rhyme: fresh, verdant, innocent.

The shepherd opens the gate: a Pavlovian green light. All wooly and bouncy, the sheep run from the field - one by one, two by two - through the open gate, down a dirt road into the milking corral where scoops of troughed corn and roasted soybeans wait.

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Witnessing this, the heart does a little bouncy hippety-hop, too. Maybe this is what quiet joy feels like, the scene unlocking the deep part of us that perfectly puzzle-pieces into a landscape like this one.

"It’s really nice to watch them graze," said Hannah Walker. "It’s really peaceful.

"Even if I’m making cheese, I can usually look at them out the window. It’s peaceful, a good feeling, especially when they’re all doing really well."

Hannah Walker is the farmer, shepherd, cheese-maker-and-monger and co-owner of Rosemary and Thyme Creamery.

On 45 acres at the base of Pigeon Mountain in north Georgia, Hannah, business partner Brent Smith and their team - including our friend Randall Tomlinson - steward a flock of 100 dairy sheep while making cheese - from Sheep Chèvre, named as an inside joke since "Chèvre" means "goat" in French, to Chamberlain’s Choice, named after the favored British cheese and WWII prime minister and the road just outside Rosemary and Thyme's gates - that routinely sells-out.

It's a three-step process.

"Grass-to-milk-to-cheese," Hannah said.

Three days a week, she makes cheese: Forever Feta, Tyri, Tomme de Lafeyette, five types of Chèvre, a cave-aged tomme caled Spice of Life.

Brent sells at Main Street Farmers' Market on Wednesday in Chattanooga, three markets - Saturday and Sunday - in Atlanta, another market in Ooltewah, Gaining Ground Grocery, Easy Bistro & Bar and a winery down the road.

Every afternoon, the flock - a blend of East Friesian, Lacaune and St. Croix - is milked. That's why we came: for the milking. And to participate. (Belated apologies, sheep.)

Hannah's bred them to create a current dairy flock that is parasitic-resistant and highly milkable.

She and Brent launched the farm + creamery in 2018. Brent, with a Peace Corps and engineering background, was an old family friend and wanted to farm. He looked around. Made invites. Hannah spoke up: I'd love to.

She'd come from dairying and cheese-making in Pennsylvania. Drawn to the formulaic aspect of cheese-making - "I like following recipes," she said - Hannah's now producing seven types of cheeses that take a minimum of five months to age.

"It's more about patience. You have to be patient with everything, especially with the sheep. And with cheese, we have to wait five months.

"If I make a mistake? I won't know about that for five or six months."

They bought their first flock from a New York dairy. Seven years later, one of those original sheep remain, the rest descendants.

Like her sheep, Hannah has that contagious part of her: it's kinda peaceful being around her. There's depth, clarity and goodness that comes when someone is grounded.

On a trip to Vietnam with her husband, she got a tattoo of a dragon down her right arm.

"I like the mystical creature," she said.

Blue eyes, speaking with both straightforward efficiency and kindness, she says a lot with a little.

"I like making food," said Hannah Walker.

Why?

"I like eating food," she answered. "I like working with animals. It's another way to work with them besides meat. I see them every day."

You get to put your hands on them every day?

"Yeah," she said, "exactly."

The young farmer with the dragon tattoo then invites the middle aged writer to - how shall I say this? - put my own hands on the sheep, which, as you may guess, will invite both comedy and error.

"Have you ever milked anything before?" she asks.

Hippety-hop.

Each afternoon, the process repeats: a shepherd opens the gate, sheep bounce down the lane, line up at the milking corral, which is an open air station where 140 gallons of milk are captured each week, shipped into adjacent cooling tanks, where Hannah makes her cheese.

"The milking is my favorite part," she said. "I like being able to work with animals. When you do it, you kind of have to figure out exactly which ones need to go at which time. They empty at different times. It’s kind of like a meditation almost, trying to figure out the milking."

Yeah, I nod. A meditation.

The sheep are bred in September; a ram that stays with them for five weeks.

Their pregnancy lasts five months.

They lamb in February or March, with the lambs staying next to the ewes for 30 days.

Weaned, then milked for five.

The mama sheep rest for a month.

"That month gives them time to build fat reserves," said Hannah.

Then, the process repeats. They get sheared once a year in November; folks sign up to join and haul the wool away.

"Lambs drink milk consistently," said Randall. "The sheep are always generating milk and releasing it to the animals."

"They’re not as good at storing it up. There’s a lot of efficiency but there’s not much room to store it."

Last time we farmed with Randall, he had his own dairy herd: cattle, not sheep. (See our story here. Plus, Randall's our guest speaker at this Thursday's Little Coyote event.)

Now, he's working with sheep.

"They're really aware of how easy it is for them to get eaten by stuff," he said. "They're a tight-knit herd mentality. If one gets nervous, they all get nervous. Small things make them tense up tightly. They're wound up really tight."

I'm about to make it a lot worse.

The sheep pile in the milking station, heads down into troughs of corn and roasted soybeans poured out from a white Ace Hardware bucket.

Randall and Hannah move through with the timed grace and practiced precision of folks who know exactly what they're doing.

First: they use rags sterilized with an iodine mix to clean the teats.

Then, they strip them off.

"We get a little milk off them," Hannah said.

The top part of the udder makes the milk, while the bottom part stores it.

"The milk sitting in the bottom of the sheep's udder canal can have a high bacterial counts, so we get it out of the way," she said.

"It's not a step you see in conventional dairying," Randall added.

My turn. I'm allowed to strip one.

"Why don't you put on some rubber gloves first?" Hannah asked.

When beginning any agricultural endeavor, it's a bad sign when even putting on the rubber gloves doesn't go well.

I go through two pairs - snap, pop, snap - before I get them on correctly.

So, who am I stripping?

(Certain phrases and terminology are normalized around a dairy that, in any other context, would sound Mad Men shocking. "Was the original one big-teated, too?" Randall asks Hannah later.)

"We had one brown sheep at the very beginning and all the ones with color now come from her," Hannah said.

Baa-baa-black sheep is chosen. I walk up behind her, eyeing one of two teats to strip.

"Yes," Hannah said. "Oh, she'll be easy."

My task: use my fingers to eeek out a little milk - just a teaspoon, perhaps - before the real milking begins.

Baa-baa-black sheep. Have you any milk?

No.

The answer is clearly no.

Because I'm stripping and tugging and pulling and yanking and nary a drop emerges. I mean, nary. Poor sheep. She must be new at this.

Hannah, I think this sheep is broken.

"Here," said Hannah. "Let me try."

Flowing. Pouring. A steady stream. All sorts of terms can be used to describe the milk now gushing like a fountain out of this sheep, whom I am eyeing: what gives?

She eyeballs back: I'm sure not giving to you, writer-man.

"It helps if you do it like this," Hannah said. "Not the whole hand. Use two fingers, pulling down."

My glove snaps again.

After stripping, the suction cups are placed on each teat which does the milking. (Takes about 10 minutes to milk a dozen sheep.) Hannah angles the cups to mirror the angle of the teat, a gesture I found so respectful and moving.

The udder deflates as the milk is suctioned out. Moving down the row, Hannah asks:

"Would you like to put the cup on?"

I fetch more gloves.

Now, it's like that scene in Star Wars, where Luke is firing the one shot into the Death Star: you've got to time it ... just ... right ... so the suction cup attaches to the dangling teat ...

Luke, of course, got to use two hands while piloting his starship. Hannah says to hold the cup in one hand and attach it with the same hand.

Hmm ... if I hold the teat like this ... and keep the cup open ...

You ever been vacuuming the living room when your Hoover sucks up something that clearly doesn't belong?

Well, imagine that sound combined with a loud baaah-bleat.

My glove got caught in the suction, trapped beneath the poor sheep's teat.

I went through 10 gloves that day.

"It takes a while to learn," Hannah said, kindly.

Here's what doesn't take a while:

Sensing the ease and solid ethical and wholesome part of Rosemary and Thyme Creamery. The farm stripped us, too: of that frantic laptop-Tiktok-iPhone-feeling omnipresent in modern America, of a background sense of alienation, of that rushed feeling where the walls are closing in.

But, like any young farmer in modern America, Hannah faces challenges. Don't romanticize this too much.

"Probably the hardest part?" she said. "When it feels like you’re doing everything right, but nothing is going right. Those are the worst times."

She wonders: why am I doing this?

Soon, the sheep are done milking for the day; the shepherd will talk to them - they know her voice - open the gate, as the process unfolds in reverse: bouncy, fluffy and all milked out, the sheep trot back back down the dirt road, into the tall grass.

"Why am I doing this?" Hannah answers. "Then you have the good times and you realize: oh yeah, this is why."

This is the second in a six-part series produced in a partnership with the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition. The series profiles young farmers in the region. Each farmer profile will contain these questions and answers. Here's Hannah:

What do you love most about farming?

I really like being outside as much as I can. The milking part is my favorite part. I like being able to work with animals. When you do it, you kind of have to figure out exactly which ones need to go at which time. They empty at different times. It’s kind of like a meditation almost, trying to figure out the milking.

What is the hardest part of farming?

Probably the hardest part? When we have crazy, crazy amounts of rain, especially during lambing season, and before we had our nutrition figured out, we’d had a lot of pregnancy toxemia, and all things were going downhill. It feels like you’re doing everything right but nothing is going right. Those are the worst times. Why am I doing this? Then you have the good times and you realize: oh yeah, this is why.

What inspires you and keeps you going?

Those good times. Just sitting and watching the sheep. And when the cheese turns out really well. We’re pretty small. Whenever I'm packaging the cheeses - especially hard cheese - we will cut into every wheel and I’ll taste into every wheel - oh yes this is really good cheese. Because these sheep are on healthy pasture and being treated well and giving us all this good milk, we get this really great product and I get to keep doing this.

And when people come and say: we’re really enjoying that. We do farm tours and it’s really fun teaching people about it.

What do you think are some misconceptions people have about farming or other agriculture work?

Sometimes, it feels like people say they want to come help, especially during lambing season and they think we just sit out here all day with the sheep and watch them have lambs. Actually, there’s a a lot of work that goes into it.

What do you hope to achieve with your farm in the next ten years?

I’m not sure if I want to get too much bigger. I'm transitioning a little bit out of the farm side of things and moving into more of cheese-making stuff. Ideally, we have someone else cheese-making and I could do sheep stuff. It’s really nice being at farmers' markets and talking to people directly.

We do want to do Airbnb and more agri-tourism. That would be biggest thing. And have all our buildings finished.

The Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition (SeTNYF) works with farmers across the Tennessee-Alabama-Georgia region, connecting them with the tools, resources, and people they need to build a successful farm business.

SeTNYF is a fiscally-sponsored Chapter of National Young Farmers Coalition. Young Farmers has a mission to shift power and change policy to equitably resource our new generation of working farmers.

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in partnering with us? Email: david@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.

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