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Sixth-generation dairy farmer

Margot Brooks went from commodity milk on family farm growing up to specialty cheeses in Upper Jay

Margot Brooks sits with some of her cows on the hill behind the Sugar House Creamery dairy farm in Upper Jay. News photo — Amy Scattergood

UPPER JAY — Just past another bridge over the East Branch of the AuSable River, a nondescript driveway turns into a collection of early-1900s farm buildings that comprise Sugar House Creamery, a little dairy farm owned and operated by Margot Brooks and Alex Eaton. Under the loom of Ebeneezer Mountain, a herd of a dozen Brown Swiss cows will likely be ambling down from a line of birch, maples and white pine when you arrive.

Brooks and Eaton and their 3-year-old daughter Harriet live in the old sugar house. When they’re not grazing, the cows live in one of the three barns. And last Sunday, Oct. 18, the carriage house and farm store opened for the first weekend of Snowy Grocery, the winter farmers market that Brooks and Eaton have been hosting for the last five years.

Thanks to the pandemic, this year Snowy Grocery operates as a pre-order and pick-up market only, though the farm store that is open year-round is also open for business.

Snowy Grocery online ordering happens from Tuesday at noon until 6 p.m. Thursday; pick-up is every Sunday from 10 a.m. to noon. Produce is offered from Wild Work Farm in Keene Valley; meats and sausages come from Mace Chasm Farm in Keeseville. And from Sugar House Creamery, you can order cheese, raw milk, cultured butter and eggs, as well as bread form Crown Point Bread Company, fermented goods from Small Town Cultures, yogurt from North Country Creamery, and tamales from Irma’s Tamales.

“When we bought the place,” said Eaton on a recent sunny afternoon, “the barn hadn’t been used for animals in like 40 years.”

Some of a herd of 12 milking cows walk down toward the barn at Sugar House Creamery in Upper Jay. News photo — Amy Scattergood

Eaton and Brooks met at St. Lawrence University, then worked together at a Vermont goat dairy farm for five years before buying the 23-acre farm that became Sugar House Creamery. The property had been a farm — the Dutch gambrel barn that dwarfs the surrounding buildings had been there for well over a century, and the farmhouse, sugar house and carriage house were still in good condition, though the pasture was well overgrown.

The couple built two smaller barns for their herd of milkers, put in a cheese cave, and remodeled the carriage house into an Airbnb and the chicken coop into a farm store where they started selling bottles of raw milk, cultured butter, and the cheeses they began making.

Brooks grew up on a 900-acre dairy farm in Central New York, so you could say milk is in her blood.

“I’m a sixth-generation dairy farmer,” she said, following her cows down the hill from the tree line. “It was commodity milk,” she says of the family farm, “so what we’re doing here is quite, quite different.”

What she, her husband and their veteran cheesemaker Casey Galligan are doing is making three kinds of French-style cheese from their own cows: a raw-milk, hard cheese called Dutch Knuckle that’s aged up to a year; a washed-rind cheese called Poundcake that’s aged for up to two months; and a soft, white-rind cheese, aged for only up to two weeks, called Little Dickens, a lactic cheese that resembles a goat cheese.

Various cow bells hang on a wall in the milking barn at Sugar House Creamery in Upper Jay. News photo — Amy Scattergood

In the beginning, both Galligan and Brooks made the cheeses; now Galligan, who lives in the farmhouse with her partner, manages the creamery and makes, ages, cuts and wraps all the cheeses.

“I always wanted to be a farmer,” said Brooks. “But in fifth grade, it wasn’t cool to be a farmer.” Especially if you’re a girl. So she decided to become a vet instead, even though every time she went home to the family farm, she’d think about it again. “I’d see how much of an impact you can have as a farmer to steward the land.”

After high school, she went to Belgium as an exchange student for a year and fell in love with cheese. “I grew up on a dairy farm where you just shipped it off,” she says of the milk they produced on her family’s farm. “I was amazed at how stinky it was,” she said of certain Belgian cheeses, “and how amazing it was.”

Back in the U.S., she took cheesemaking courses at the University of Vermont, and after college she and Eaton got jobs at Consider Bardwell Farm, a goat dairy in Vermont. Then they started looking for a dairy of their own.

“We didn’t want to be making product that we had to sling in New York City,” Brooks said. At the farm in Upper Jay, the couple found a place where they could raise cows for milk and veal, and make cheese for the local community.

Sugar House Creamery in Upper Jay sells bottles of raw milk, which you can return for a discount on the next bottle. News photo — Amy Scattergood

“It felt so Alpine. It felt so right.”

So they got the Airbnbs going — there are two, one above an old carriage house, the other in the farmhouse — opened the farm store, and began selling product to local restaurants.

When the pandemic hit, that changed, but they’ve adapted. Restaurants are buying again, and people have been buying cheese and milk — a lot of milk.

“In the beginning, we thought it was because all the kids were home eating cereal,” said Brooks, who said that business in the spring was as busy as summer usually is.

“Food is a comfort,” Brooks said, petting the soft felt-gray head of one of her more sociable cows. “It’s something to ease your mind a little.”

One cow wanders downhill toward the Sugar House Creamery dairy farm in Upper Jay. News photo — Amy Scattergood

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