Melanie Webb was working in the ritzy Manhattan world of fine art photography when she started getting curious about where her food came from. First she joined a CSA, then she took a freelance photo gig on a farm, and before long she was meeting a dealer in an unmarked van to buy illegal raw milk. Then, in 2007 at the Burlington farmers market, she met a Vermont dairy farmer named Tyler who'd become her husband, and she decided to trade work in New York's fashionable Meatpacking District for a life surrounded by actual livestock.
Webb is now the resident cheesemaker at Stony Pond Farm, where she produces some of our favorite farmstead cheeses with milk from her and Tyler's herd. Swallow Tail Tomme is one of our references to show off the quality and innovation of American artisan cheesemaking. The raw milk wheel, loosely styled after French Tomme de Savoie, is delightfully buttery and lactic with notes of pine and earth; it has a downy grey and brown rind with unique molds that are endemic to Stony Pond's aging cave. We recently added Webb's Black Capped Cache to our collection as well. This is a subtly funky washed rind cheese made with rich autumn milk to enjoy over the doldrums of winter. It melts like a dream and produces a mouthwatering aroma as it does so.
"It took us 15 years to be in a place where we could think about making cheese," Webb says. "I'm still getting to know my aging room. I make tweaks year after year." Her husband first bought Stony Pond in 2003 with the intention of raising beef cattle. By the time he and Melanie met, he had switched to a small herd of 30 dairy cows. The couple spent years developing infrastructure in the fields and milking barn and improving the genetics of their herd, which now numbers around 70 cows. That work continues to this day—they recently expanded their barn to provide enough space for all their cows to eat at the same time. The Webbs figured the cows would naturally rotate access to food as they got full, but it turns out that some cows are too demure to take their meals if there isn't room for everyone to feast all at once. This is the life of a small dairy farmer: developing an intimate understanding of how these smart and soulful animals live their lives.
Webb decided to start making cheese to capture additional value from their milk. Organic Valley, the buyer of their fluid milk, changes the price they offer seasonally. When milk is abundant in the spring, the price goes down. Come winter when milk is more scarce, that rate increases. Cheese provided a way for Webb to retain the value of their beautiful spring milk from cows that feed on their mixed perennial pasture. The Webbs are serious about pastured dairy. Cows get rotated into new paddocks every 12 hours to give the land time to regenerate. Webb tracks which paddock every batch of milk comes from, and when she sends a batch of cheese to us, she includes a snapshot of a pasture illustration with movable cow stickers to show us exactly how her cows converted specific patches of grass into milk.
Stony Pond's creamery has an interesting setup. On days when Webb makes cheese, raw milk from the barn is piped directly into the make room at 90°F, "still warm from the cow." That means the milk is never refrigerated before getting turned into cheese, and each batch comes from a single milking. "The goal is to capture that freshness," she says. "It's something special that not everyone notices, but I hope something comes through in the cheese where maybe you can't put your finger on it, but you say wow, that's really good."
In 2019, Webb studied cheesemaking with a neighbor at Does' Leap Farm and got advice on running an agricultural business from Saxelby favorite Laini Fondiller. She began making cheese at Stony Pond a year later. Refining her cheeses has been a process of trial and error, both in the make room and the aging cave. Making artisan cheese is a blend of art and science. As tribute to both, all of Stony Pond's cheeses are named after native birds that take up residence on the land. "The farm supports so many different animals that people don't think about," Webb says. "Swallows were the first birds to nest in our cow lanes after we put up the bird houses that now dot the farm. They're natural fly control." The land is also a haven for foxes, raccoons, deer, bears, opossums, voles, moles, and all kinds of critters. On a factory farm, such wildlife is a nuisance. At this small family operation, they're part of a cohesive ecosystem.
Now six years into her career as a cheesemaker, Webb is continuing to tinker with new styles and techniques. This past fall she made a test batch of an Alpine style cheese that she'll start tasting in the spring. She takes a break from cheesemaking during the winter to reconnect with her community, visit distributors and cheesemongers, and review what worked and what didn't in the previous season. It's a world away from her old city life, but now if she wants a sip of raw milk, she doesn't have to wait on a cold Brooklyn street corner for an illicit handoff. The cows are friendly neighbors.
Try Stony Pond's amazing farmstead cheeses for yourself!
Farm photos courtesy of Stony Pond Farm.
