About Hidden Springs Farm
At the end of a winding road, Hidden Springs Farm perches atop a beautiful green ridge in the heart of the Coulee, on the patchwork terrain of Wisconsin's "Driftless Area" (the area that the glacier skipped).
If you've ever been to Wisconsin, just imagine the most beautiful parts of the countryside that you've ever seen -- that's just what Hidden Springs looks like! It is the perfect environment to raise dairy sheep for the purest, most delicious milk and cheeses.
Brenda and Dean Jensen of Hidden Springs Farm started their dairy with a small herd of 50 dairy sheep, Dean's bright idea.
Today, they milk 116 Lacaune and East Friesian dairy sheep, and they have 110 lambs. Their sheep are better breeds than the small dairy herd that started them: Frisians are good producers and very calm; Lacaunes bring higher fat and protein.
Brenda grew up on a small farm and had a career as a corporate manufacturing manager. She left corporate America in June 2006 to pursue her sheep creamery and cheese making.
Dean is a mental health therapist with his own practice and works with the Amish. His clinic is next to the creamery and he built a perfect cheese-aging cave underground between the clinic and the main house. It's actually a tunnel that connects the two, but it will be great as Brenda experiments with cave-aging her delicious cheeses.
Their vision for Hidden Springs Farm and Creamery is to be sustainable environmentally as well as financially. They are in the middle of Amish farm country, and the Jensens appreciate Amish values and work practices. They employ Amish friends and neighbors for milking and construction. Percheron draft horses -- not tractors -- plow their fields, donkeys keep coyotes and other predators away from their lambs, and their sheep feast seasonally on the green grasses on their 30 acres of fenced pasture.
Visit our online story: We update our story every time we make cheese or any other time something interesting happens and we have a chance to update. You can see what was going on the day we made your cheese, and learn more about what it's really like to live on a sheep dairy farm.
