Registration opened this week for Workshop: Lark Goat & Sheep Milk, a hands-on session running Friday, May 29th. It's a smaller workshop than most of what we run, by design — goat and sheep milk cheesemaking is a corner of the industry that a growing number of members are curious about but few have any formal training in, and we'd rather teach it in a room with twenty people than a webinar with two hundred.
Goat and sheep milk behave differently enough from cow's milk that a lot of the intuition members have built up over years of cow-milk cheesemaking doesn't transfer cleanly. Fat and protein structure differ, culture behavior shifts, and the traditional styles most associated with sheep milk in particular are frequently built around aging protocols that don't map onto a typical cow's-milk cave rotation. Published research on the dairy sheep and goat sector backs up what our members have been telling us: most of the milk produced by these animals ends up in cheese rather than fluid sales, and demand for it in the U.S. skews specialty and artisanal rather than commodity, which is exactly the kind of shelf space our smaller producer members have been trying to find room in.
What the day covers
The workshop is split roughly in half. The morning is hands-on cheesemaking — a small-batch make using both goat and sheep milk side by side, so participants can feel the difference in curd set and handling directly rather than just hearing about it. The afternoon moves into aging and finishing: how humidity and turning schedules for these milks differ from what most members already know, and how to think about affinage timelines that may run longer or shorter than a comparable cow's-milk style.
We're capping attendance at twenty-four to keep the hands-on portion workable, and priority goes to members who are actively sourcing goat or sheep milk already, even in small volume, over members who are simply curious. If you fall into the second group, we'd still encourage you to register — waitlist spots tend to open up, and the course will run again if demand supports it.
Why we're running this now
A handful of members have told us they're fielding more customer questions about goat and sheep milk cheeses than they were a few years ago, particularly from customers who've traveled and are looking for something closer to what they tasted abroad. That's a demand signal worth taking seriously, even in a market where these milks remain a small share of total dairy production nationally. Members who've built a credible goat or sheep milk program, even a modest one, describe it as a genuine point of differentiation in a case that otherwise looks like every other case in town.
It's also worth naming the trend this cuts against. Federal agricultural data published this month describes decades of steady consolidation into fewer, larger dairy operations, with the typical milking herd many times the size it was a generation ago. That's not a story goat and sheep milk producers are part of in the same way — the sector stays small-scale and specialty almost by nature — and it's one more reason we think a niche like this is worth a dedicated workshop rather than a single afternoon folded into a general cheesemaking course.
Registration is open now through the events page on the member portal, and the fee covers materials, milk, and a take-home sample of your finished wheel once it's had a few weeks to develop. If you have questions about whether this workshop is the right fit for where your program is right now, the Education Committee is a good first call.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.