It has been my lifelong dream to live and work on a piece of land in New England with my sister. We grew up in the woods outside of Keene, NH where we spent our days frolicking in the stream beside our parents’ large vegetable garden. As we grew older our paths diverged, taking me to New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Boulder to pursue a career as a professional chef and food writer while Katie trained and worked as a wildlife biologist in locales spanning from the North Slope of Alaska to the Big Island of Hawaii to the rocky coast of New Brunswick. I always hoped we would both someday wind up back in New England though, and owing to a collective passion for skiing and snowboarding, we and and our partners were drawn again and again to Stowe. A dream come true, my husband and I purchased Sage Farm in 2007.

I had spent the previous two years in Boulder working at Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy where I fell in love with goats and began learning the art of cheese making. Although still cooking and writing about food, I soon became so enchanted with taking care of goats and making cheese that I began making plans to start a small goat dairy of my own. Although she was at work on a Master’s degree in conservation science, I knew it wouldn’t take much arm-twisting to get Katie on board. My husband, Dave, agreed to go along with this ambitious undertaking as well, even though our first child was on the way.  

Sage Farm was previously a sheep farm, so we already had a place to put our animals and a sizable acreage of established pasture land. With the help of our dad, an experienced builder, we embarked on the daunting task of building our cheese making facility, a project that required a lot of hard labor and a good amount of ingenuity. We converted an old chicken coop into our milking parlor and built an addition onto to the barn’s garage to house the milk room, cheese room, and aging room. 

For many years, we all lived on the farm and ran our business collectively, everyone doing their part to keep things running smoothly. Our two houses were located on either side of the milking barn, and we divvied up the work load; I performed most of the cheese making and aging and Katie managed the goats and the pastures. Dave kept the books and did a lot of tractor and chainsaw work, ranging from compost management to hauling firewood. Bob's endeavors included farmer’s markets, maple syrup production, cider-making, and keeping us all in a good sense of humor.

During this earlier phase, we were also raising two human children on the farm. Juliette was not even 6 months old when we purchased our first goats from Lazy Lady Farm in the spring of 2008 and Soren was born amid the final throes of cheese room construction in May of 2009. I made our very first batches of cheese with a weeks-old Soren snuggled into a basket on the floor of the new cheese room.  As they grew older, both children began to help with goat midwifery and kid feeding, cleaning chores, and simple tasks in the cheese room. 

These days, things have changed a little as our farm family has morphed and expanded. My family and I now live down the hill closer to town, and our cheesemaker/goat milker extraordinaire, Colleen Cataldo, and her fiancé, Corey, live in my old house. Colleen has been working with us in some capacity now for four years, and she has become an indispensable member of our team. I still manage the cheese room, Katie still manages the herd, barns and pastures, and Bob still makes lots of maple syrup and slings our farm products at markets all season long. The teenagers and Dave aren’t too involved on the farm anymore, as they are tremendously busy with their own endeavors. But even at age 15, Soren is still game to make a Sage Farm goat family tree, Juliette is still a great goat midwife, and Dave is always good for cheese deliveries in a pinch. Katie and I are still two sisters running a farm together, seventeen years later.

Thank you for your interest in our livelihood,

Molly